In the far northern reaches of Chile, there is a land surrounded by borders. Peru on one side. Bolivia on the other. It is a land where soldiers forced assimilation with the barrel of a gun. Embrace your Chilean identity, or die. Those soldiers came in waves, always in the wake of the sound of boots marching, guns firing, tanks rolling.

But the people here were more than Chilean. Their blood ran from rivers of the Andes mountains. Or from their homelands far across the ocean in Central Africa. They were Aymara and Quechua. Black, Peruvian, and Bolivian. They sang their own songs. And danced their own dances. First quietly, and then louder and louder. 

They borrowed dances from the homeland of their people in Bolivia. They built folk groups to practice and perform. And they grew.

Today, the Arica carnival is known as the fuerza del sol — the strength of the sun. It’s the largest carnival in Chile. 16,000 performers dance in 80 different groups. 

For three days, the drums ring. The instruments play. The dancers move through the streets in synchronized succession.

This carnival is an act of resistance. A celebration of multicultural identity. Of Indigenous roots. Of remembering and celebrating who they are.

“This carnival is a mixture of cultures where we all embrace with one objective. To maintain our culture viva — alive,” says Fredy Amaneces. He wears an elaborate purple outfit with a colorful headdress.

The carnival begins with a ceremony for Pachamama, Mother Earth. An Indigenous shaman on a working-class street corner lights a flame and says a prayer. 

Each joyful step is an offering to their connection with the land, and their past.

“We dance with our hearts,” says Judith Mamani, in a yellow Cholita dress. “We sing with everything we have, because these are our roots.”

Each jump, each twist and turn, each movement, re-lives a story of the past. Each shout and song a revival of their ancestry. Each move a defiant promise that their culture and identity will only continue and grow.

Regardless of what may come.

Stories of Resistance is a new project, co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

This story is based on reporting Michael did for PRX The World.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Back to the Earth

In the early days of COVID, when the disease spreads like wildfire 

And ICU units overflow capacity

There are few places as bad as Brazil

And the Amazon is ground zero 

A sign of just how scary it can get

And what awaits everyone else

Mass graves in Manaus

Hospitals at capacity

Oxygen running out

Cases spiking 

The death count rising

Particularly among Indigenous populations

And president Jair Bolsonaro laughs off the virus

He tells cameras it was just a little cold

That he is strong and won’t catch it (even though he does)

He fights with governors

And attacks lockdowns

And refuses to wear masks

And pushes unproven drugs

And his government turns its back on Indigenous communities

Bolsonaro’s administration pulls officials working to protect native lands

And health workers who cared for their peoples

And left Indigenous territories stranded, like islands in a sea of unknown and fear

But the country’s Indigenous peoples are used to having backs turned against them.

And they take action.

They set up roadblocks in the entrances into their territories. 

They test temperatures 

And spray alcohol 

And distribute masks

And block unwanted visitors

And stand tall against the disease

Which they know can ravage their peoples

And when COVID does spread to their lands

Like it does everywhere

They turn to their ancestral medicine

Their native plants

They share their knowledge with other neighboring tribes. 

That’s what Indigenous leader Almerinda Ramos de Lima saw 

in the farthest reaches of Brazil. 

in the Upper Rio Negro, 

near the Colombian Border.

“They didn’t wait for exams. They didn’t wait for doctors to arrive,” she says.

“Each community organized 

and shared the traditional medicines that they were preparing.”

“Where we have forests, 

where we have plants, 

we have traditional medicine,” she says. 

“We have our cure inside the forest.”

Historic Indigenous leaders still fell. 

Chief Aritana Yawalapiti, who led his Xingu people for five decades. 

Paulinho Paiakan, of the Kayapó.

Artist and healer Vovó Bernaldina… from the Macuxi tribe in the Raposa Serra do Sol territory. 

Reservoirs of knowledge and wisdom. Heartbreaking losses. 

But their people sang. 

And danced their tribal dances. 

And honored their loved ones and their elders.

And new leaders have risen. 

Fighting to protect their lands, their communities and their way of life.

Now and forever.

Hi folks. thanks for listening. This is the fourth episode of Stories of Resistance. This is a new project co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. I’m your host, writer, and producer, Michael Fox. I’m a longtime journalist based in Latin America. Each week, I’ll bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review. 

I’ve also just launched a Kickstarter to help get this podcast series off the ground and up and running. I’ll add a link in the show notes.

As always, thanks for listening. I hope you like the stories. 

This is the fourth episode of Stories of Resistance.

Stories of Resistance is a new project, co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review.

We’ve recently launched a Kickstarter to help get the series off the ground. You can support it by clicking here: Stories of Resistance: Inspiration for Dark Times Kickstarter

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

This story originally appeared in Yes! Magazine on Sep. 4, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

When I was in middle school, at a majority-white public school in Montana, I was given an assignment to interview a grandparent about their childhood. The questions were designed to help us better understand what we did and did not have in common with each other.

When I interviewed my maternal grandmother, I asked her whether there was ever a bully at her school. Her answer surprised me; she said she was the bully. “I always had soap in my mouth,” she said, punished for “talking back” to her teachers—and punished for speaking her first language: Blackfeet.

My grandmother was a student at the St. Ignatius Mission and School, a church-run, assimilationist boarding school on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She told me stories about the horrific punishments she endured simply for being Blackfeet and about her classmates who were buried on the school grounds.

Unfortunately, my grandmother’s story is not an anomaly. Instead, her experience is representative of generations of genocidal federal policy. Beginning in 1801, more than 500 assimilative boarding schools operated across the United States, including 408 government-run schools in operation between 1819 and 1969. During this time, multiple generations of my family attended boarding school, including 12 people I’m directly descended from on my maternal side: my grandmother, all four of my great-grandparents, and seven of my eight great-great-grandparents.

Boarding schools were part of an intentional, genocidal policy aimed at “civilizing” Native people and eradicating our nations, communities, cultures, languages, religions, and family ties. Indigenous families were either forced or coerced to send their children to boarding schools. Families who refused were denied the money or goods paid to them in exchange for land, as designated in treaty agreements. This coercion was enshrined in an 1893 code that allowed the secretary of the interior to “withhold rations, clothing and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who refuse or neglect to send and keep their children of proper school age in some school a reasonable portion of the year.”

Indigenous children were often taken to schools far away from their homes because, as John B. Riley, an Indian school superintendent, said in 1886, “only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.” My grandmother first attended St. Ignatius Mission, which is about 200 miles south of her home on the Blackfeet Reservation. She later attended the Chemawa Indian Training School in Oregon, 700 miles west of home and two states away.

Once at school, children experienced what the Department of the Interior described as “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies.” Before kids as young as age 6 stepped foot in a classroom, their long hair — culturally significant for many tribes — was cut to imitate white hairstyles. They were also required to wear military, non-tribal clothing as uniforms, and they were required to speak English — a language many didn’t speak at home.

It is important to reframe what we mean by “school.” These were sites of exploitation and cultural genocide, not places where Native children were educated. The dominant narrative about boarding schools often excludes or de-emphasizes the role of forced labor, or what some scholars conceptualize as human trafficking. Many of my family’s stories about boarding school are about working rather than being educated. In fact, unpaid labor was the goal.

A 2022 report by the Department of the Interior, the first ever to examine the extent of federal boarding schools in the U.S., highlighted the breadth of unpaid labor Native children performed at school: “lumbering, working on the railroad — including on the road and in car shops, carpentering, blacksmithing, fertilizing, irrigation system development, well-digging, making furniture including mattresses, tables, and chairs, cooking, laundry and ironing services, and garment-making, including for themselves and other children in Federal Indian boarding schools.”

My family members performed other unpaid duties: My grandmother’s brother worked as a butcher and a barber, while my great-grandpa worked as a rancher. Some children were also taken out of school to perform unpaid labor in the surrounding community. In California, thousands of Native children were unpaid indentured servants on white ranches, farms, hotels, and households.

A 1928 report by the Institute for Government Research on the social and economic conditions of Native peoples, known as the Meriam Report, notes that Indian boarding schools violated child labor laws in most states. And though it was released 12 years before my grandmother was born, the findings did not lessen the impact of her experience at boarding school.

In addition to robbing children of their cultural and linguistic identities, boarding schools had other devastating impacts. Children were beaten and sexually abused. They experienced overcrowding, food deprivation and nutritional experimentation, and widespread infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.

They were forcibly separated from the love and connection and support and validation of their families and communities. They spent years working as unpaid laborers without receiving an education that could aid them after graduation. Some children died before ever having the opportunity to become parents or eventually elders. These experiences have left generational wounds on survivors, their families, and broader Indigenous communities that continue to hurt to this day.

Agenda of assimilation

Boarding schools were just one part of the federal government’s efforts to eradicate tribal nations. As boarding schools sought to eliminate tribal languages, religions, and cultures among Native children, the federal government passed policies making these cultural practices illegal in Native communities. In 1883, the Code of Indian Offenses banned tribal religious practice. The Indian Religious Crimes Code was reversed in 1934, but it wasn’t until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that all legal restrictions on practice were lifted. Still, issues remain today, particularly when it comes to accessing sacred sites and practicing tribal religions in prison. In 1887, the use of tribal languages was banned in schools; this was not reversed until the 1990 passage of the Native American Languages Act, or NALA.

The General Allotment Act of 1887 also had devastating economic, cultural, and political consequences for tribal communities. The act converted communal tribal land into private property and turned individual Native men into private property owners. Tribal landowners were forced to make land agriculturally productive, even in areas where the land was not suitable as such, and the U.S. government assessed their success, or lack thereof. This assimilative tactic drastically shifted, or attempted to shift, Native peoples’ relationship to the land at the same time that their children were being removed from their homes and forced to labor for white people.

The impacts of boarding school and these policies can be understood through the lens of historical trauma, a term conceptualized by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Ph.D., a Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota social worker, in 1995. Historical trauma is the idea that intergenerational, compounded trauma has measurable impacts on the mental health of the descendants of traumatic events, including the forced separation of Native children from their families.

A 2004 study that asked Native participants how often they thought about historical losses, such as the seizure of land and boarding schools, found that “perceptions of historical loss are not confined to the more proximate elder generation, but are salient in the minds of many adults of the current generation.” This generational trauma has impacted how families interact with each other: My grandmother didn’t teach my mother Blackfeet because she didn’t want her to be discriminated against for speaking English with a Blackfeet accent.

Boarding schools have also impacted the physical health of Native Americans: Research suggests that boarding school survivors are more likely to have chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, and arthritis, than Native people who didn’t attend boarding school.

Boarding schools have also had other material impacts on Native communities. The jobs students were training for often did not match jobs available back home, making it difficult to find meaningful employment after leaving school. Today, Native people continue to face higher rates of poverty and unemployment, and lower rates of homeownership compared to white people. Native children also continue to be removed from their homes, and are disproportionately impacted by child welfare reports, investigations, and out-of-home placements.

Native people know that the legacy of boarding schools continues to impact our communities’ physical health, mental health, housing and economic stability, educational attainment, parenting and family functioning, cultural knowledge, and more. And yet, there has been limited storytelling — in media, academic research, and government reports — that measures these impacts.

Contemporary truth telling

For many people in Indian Country, it is quotidian to share stories about boarding schools. Boarding schools are openly discussed in my family: My grandma, and great-grandma when she was alive, spoke about their time as students, about their friends who died of poisoning from the lye in the soap placed in their mouths, and about the labor they performed. I grew up having family picnics on the grounds of the boarding school my great-grandmother attended; her grandmother is buried in the school’s cemetery.

Over the past 50-plus years, there have been a handful of federal government programs attempting to reckon with the tragedy of boarding schools. In 1969, a decade after my grandmother left boarding school, a scalding report titled “Indian Education: A National Tragedy — a National Challenge” illuminated the disastrous impacts of boarding schools, noting that they were “a failure when measured by any reasonable set of criteria.” In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, was passed, which prioritized placing Native children with family members and tribal members before placing them with non-Native families.

ICWA notes that “there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children.” Advocates for the bill recognized that removing Native children from their families—through both boarding schools and the child welfare system—had devastating impacts on both the children and their broader communities. In 1990, NALA passed, allowing the use of tribal languages in schools for the first time since the late 19th century. These legal efforts focused on ensuring Native children stayed connected to their families and cultures but stopped short of collecting testimony from boarding school survivors.

In recent years, there has been increased media attention paid to boarding schools, notably after mass graves were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada in 2021. There’s also been in-depth reporting in national newspapers about the extent of sexual abuse in boarding schools in the U.S., and an episode of Reservation Dogs, a hit FX show that aired for three seasons from 2021 to 2023, about the traumatic impacts of residential schools.

Since Deb Haaland, a descendant of boarding school survivors, became secretary of the interior in 2021, there has been a surge of federal interest in truth telling from boarding school survivors and their descendants. In 2021, after decades of advocacy from tribes and Native organizations, the Department of the Interior launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which included an extensive federal report on the impacts of boarding schools, the first-ever inventory of federal boarding schools, and the collection of testimony from boarding school survivors.

Part of the initiative is the Road to Healing project, launched in 2022, in which Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland toured the U.S. to collect testimony from hundreds of boarding school survivors. Boarding school survivors and their descendants were also invited to publicly speak about their experiences. For some survivors, this was their first time speaking about their boarding school experiences. Each event had trauma counselors and break rooms to support survivors.

The Department of the Interior is also funding the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, to continue to gather testimony from boarding school survivors over the next few years and create a public oral history repository. These efforts will ensure that the stories and experiences of survivors are preserved for future generations and, survivors hope, help hold the U.S. accountable for the atrocities perpetrated.

Survival and resistance

On the legislative front, advocates are pushing for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, which was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2023 and the U.S. House in 2024. Truth and reconciliation efforts are not an uncommon response to violence like cultural genocide. Dozens of states across the globe have attempted truth and reconciliation efforts. Some consider Argentina’s 1983 National Commission on the Disappeared to be the first major effort, though the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission: South Africa, led by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, is perhaps the most well-known. There have been a handful of commissions focused on the impacts of colonialism, including one in Australia and one in Maine examining the placement of Wabanaki tribal children into foster care since the 1970s.

The truth and reconciliation effort that may most closely mirror what is being proposed in the U.S. is Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacy of Indian residential schools, which is a result of the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. Like the U.S., the Canadian government and Christian churches operated assimilationist boarding schools for Indigenous youths in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This commission was not the Canadian government’s first attempt to support boarding school survivors. In 1998, it established the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which distributed $515 million to Indigenous community initiatives that addressed impacts of residential schools until federal funding was cut in 2010. After the truth and reconciliation lawsuit, the commission interviewed more than 6,500 witnesses between 2007 and 2013. In December 2015, they released a document with 94 calls to action, ranging from adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a model for reconciliation to providing stable funding for community-based alternatives to incarceration for Indigenous peoples.

However, progress to fulfill these calls to action has been slow. The Yellowhead Institute, which tracked progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over five years, noted that at the rate the Canadian government was moving, it wouldn’t finish implementing the calls to action until 2081.

An unintended consequence of the commission has been the growth of boarding school “denialism” among non-Indigenous people in Canada. In a 2023 interim report from the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, the increase in denialism was identified as a top 12 concern held by boarding school survivors, descendants, and families. For example, after mass graves of 215 children were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, some people, including political commentators, priests, and Danielle Pierce, the premier of the province of Alberta, downplayed the news as a media hoax. Some denialists went so far as to bring shovels to the Kamloops site to “see for themselves” if children were indeed buried there.

Denialism is the final “stage of genocide” in Genocide Watch’s 10 stages of genocide, a widely used policy tool developed by Gregory Stanton, Ph.D. This increase in denialism necessitates the importance of storytelling. Truth and reconciliation — or in the case of the U.S. bill, truth and healing — is not a panacea for the material and psychological impacts on individuals, communities, and families. But allowing people to tell their stories is an important step. If passed, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act would establish a commission tasked with investigating the genocidal practices of boarding schools and would require the federal government to hold public hearings with survivors, their families, and communities to help create this document.

The commission would also attempt to make a record of the number of children who attended federal boarding schools; document the number of children who were abused, went missing, or died in federal boarding schools; and outline the ongoing impacts of boarding schools on survivors and their families. As Native communities throughout the country continue to record their stories — and the Truth and Healing bill advances through Congress — many questions remain.

What does it mean for the same government that created these violent policies to lead a so-called “healing” process mere decades later? Does the focus on reconciliation rather than healing focus too much on perpetrators and those who benefit from colonialism “coming together” with those they harmed, versus focusing on support of victims and survivors? Is truth telling inherently beneficial to the truth teller? Or might it be traumatic for people to share their stories without tangible action coming from it?

Boarding school survivors and tribal communities have made one thing clear: A nuanced reckoning of the expansive, intergenerational impacts of boarding schools is absolutely necessary, and tribally driven solutions based on Indigenous healing — not government or church abdication — must be centered.

When my grandmother’s older sister passed away in 2020, my family got access to 30 pages of scanned files from Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, which they both attended. In these files are report cards, notes on her medical needs, comments from teachers, and other correspondence. One report card includes a “citizenship” section, which lists her “good” behavior (one item, “dragging mattress down hall in dust”) and “poor” behaviors (12 items, including “did not go to church”). Throughout the scanned documents are references to the sisters’ supposedly “unstable life” at home on the reservation.

Further down in the files is a scanned letter from my great-grandparents written on Nov. 10, 1954. On one side is a letter asking that their daughters, my grandmother and her sister, be sent home on the train. They were 14 and 15. “You send them home this week” is the last sentence, written in pencil with each word underlined in blue ink. On the back, they wrote the train schedule from Salem, Oregon, where the boarding school was, to Browning, the main town on the Blackfeet Reservation. They also sent train fare. The next page is the response from the principal of the school. “We are at a loss to understand just what your intention is in the matter,” she wrote. But by Nov. 15, 1954, they were both withdrawn from the school.

Native people have always resisted colonialism and fought to protect our families, communities, cultures, and nations. When my grandmother and her sister were at boarding school, their parents tried to be actively engaged in their children’s lives — and worked proactively to get them back. When tribal religions were illegal, my family continued to practice, pray, and hold ceremonies.

As I am writing this, wild mint, yarrow, bee balm, white sage, and sweet grass that I collected last night with my mother are drying in my room. I’ll use them for medicinal teas and smudging throughout the year, and we’ll gather more next summer. My family continues to gather, prepare, and use Blackfeet plant medicine. Despite policies intentionally trying to obliterate our culture, my relatives still passed down this ancestral knowledge and love.

We are running out of time to capture the vital stories of boarding school survivors. My grandma is the last living boarding school survivor in my family; her parents and her siblings who attended boarding school have passed away. Advocates say the impacts on parenting, family relationships, and tribal communities and economies — both psychological and very material — need to be part of the conversation to truly understand the impacts of boarding schools and the contemporary disparities and injustices still facing Indigenous communities today.

Boarding schools took a lot away from my family. Truth telling is one step toward government and church accountability, public education, and perhaps most importantly, helping families like mine rebuild what was taken from us for future generations. Truth telling can help us rebuild our relationships to each other, strengthen and revitalize our cultural practices, and begin to heal, on our own terms, from the ongoing violence of colonization.

Edmonton police recently arrested award-winning Indigenous journalist Brandi Morin as she was covering their raid of a local homeless encampment. Morin, who has contributed a number of stories to The Real News, including original documentaries Killer Water and Thacker Pass—Mining the Sacred, speaks with Taya Graham, co-host of Police Accountability Report, on her arrest and the deeper systemic issues of police abuse and anti-Indigenous racism in Canada.

Transcript

Taya Graham:  We all know that the incredible power we bestow upon police is easily abused. There are so many examples, it would take the entire podcast to recount just a sliver of them.

But when law enforcement overreach and journalism intersect, it’s particularly troubling for a variety of reasons. Least of all is simply the notion that if police feel empowered to arrest someone for reporting, it would be an all-too-easy way to suppress one of the most effective checks against the abuse of police powers.

And that’s why today we are talking to an incredible journalist who just experienced this type of abuse of police power. She’s someone who’s well known to Real News listeners for her outstanding work chronicling the fight of Indigenous communities against the greed of mining companies in both Canada and the US.

Her name is Brandi Morin. And she produced, in conjunction with Ricochet Media and The Real News, two outstanding documentaries, along with other pieces.

Her documentary, Killer Water, exposes the long-hidden truths of big oil’s operations on the health and environment of local First Nation communities. Her other film, Thacker Pass, exposes the efforts to mine Lithium from sacred land in Arizona, and asks hard questions about the lesser-known costs and impacts of green energy initiatives. Both films exemplify her brand of hard-hitting narrative storytelling.

But recently, while she was covering a police raid of a homeless encampment in Edmonton, Canada, she found herself in the unwelcome position of being arrested and charged simply for reporting.

At the time, she was doing what encapsulates the heart of her work: exposing the abuse of others at the hands of state power. And to discuss what happened, the consequences for independent journalists everywhere, and how she’s fighting back, we are so happy to be joined today by Brandi Morin for this special edition of the Police Accountability Report podcast. Brandi, thank you so much for joining me.

Brandi Morin:  Tânisi [hello], it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Taya Graham:  So Brandi, first let me just get right to the heart of it. Can you tell me what happened on the day of your arrest? What were you documenting at that time before you were arrested?

Brandi Morin:  Yes. So I was in the city of Edmonton in Treaty 6 territory, not far from where I live, documenting an Indigenous-led encampment that was being evicted by the city that had been doing a number of sweeps of tent encampments across the city. And police were enforcing these injunctions.

So, I had been at this particular camp for a couple of days. The police had been there the day before, and they had managed to negotiate with the Indigenous people camping there to only take down a few of the structures that were not inhabited by anybody living there.

So I’d gone back on the second day, which was last Wednesday, to do more in-depth interviews, to get the experiences of the people living there. I had been in a teepee structure, which was home to the camp leader, Roy Cardinal, he’s also known as Big Man, and was doing interviews. They were drumming and singing in there.

Somebody came in and said, the police are here. I went outside and saw that the police were putting up yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter of this approximately two-acre city-owned lot where this encampment was, and there was several of them amassing.

A few minutes later, Big Man, some other people that lived in the camp, as well as supporters, came to address the police. And the police said, we are here to dismantle this camp. We have warming buses waiting if you want to go and sit on these buses. Because it was extremely, extremely cold. And they said, you have the opportunity to leave peacefully, or you are going to be forcibly removed, and your encampment is going to be taken down anyway.

So Roy and the others, they refused to leave. Roy looked at a couple of other Indigenous men that were with him, and they were carrying ceremonial items. And he said, okay, eagle feathers up boys. And they put their hands up in the air with these eagle feathers.

So the police moved towards Roy. I was filming it with my iPhone, and chaos completely broke out. People were screaming, there was snow flying everywhere from the boots on the ground.

And one of the officers came up to me and said, move, you need to get back behind the yellow tape. And I stated that I was media, that I was there to document, that I wasn’t going behind the tape. Now, oftentimes police will create these, what they call exclusion zones for the media. But this yellow tape that they had created was too far away to be able to see and accurately document what was unfolding.

Taya Graham:  Could you estimate what that distance is? Because I’m very interested in these exclusion zones.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. So one of them was at least 40, 50 feet away. The other one that they were pushing me towards the side was probably 30, maybe more feet away. It was pretty far.

Meanwhile, the scene is unfolding. There are other people there filming. There was no media inside. So I think that the media may have, the mainstream media, that they may have been tipped off that the police were coming to do this raid. Because before I went into the teepee, there was no mainstream media there. And then when I came out, there was some there with cameras behind the yellow tape, along with the police.

So I seen them way back there. I was already inside doing this work. And next thing I know I was handcuffed and led to a paddy wagon, and then taken to downtown police headquarters. Held for five hours, which I’m told by one of my lawyers that that’s pretty unprecedented for police to hold somebody with no criminal record for obstruction for five hours, when I should have been held for maybe a half an hour at the most.

So when I was released, they had me sign a form with a promise to appear in court and said that I was charged with obstruction.

Taya Graham:  What’s interesting to me is that, as I was doing my research for this, I noticed that the police cited that this exclusion zone, and also the city of Edmonton said this as well, that this distance is for your own protection.

So you’re arrested, you’re cuffed, and you’re given a criminal offense: obstruction. Do you feel like you were protected during this experience?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah, you know what? No. I felt like I was there doing my job. And from the people that I spoke to on the ground, who were dealing with police, they told me that they felt unsafe. Because the police had the power in this situation. The police had these weapons.

And in Canada, Indigenous people are 10 times more likely than a white person to be shot and killed by police. The violence against Native people in this country is massively high, especially in all of these different systems by police.

And again, this is not my first rodeo, so to speak. I have documented police actions on various land defense actions or blockades.

Taya Graham:  That touches on something I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned that there’s a higher rate of police brutality, police violence against Indigenous people. You’ve documented some really forceful removal of residents from these encampments. Can you describe some of what you’ve witnessed and how it’s affected those who are living there?

Brandi Morin:  Unfortunately, that day I was arrested and taken away and unable to see with my own eyes the full extent of what went down. I’d seen Big Man being jumped on by multiple officers. Afterwards, I saw footage of him being let away with blood in his mouth. He’s 51 years old.

And these are people that are experiencing a lot of different struggles. They are living in vulnerable situations, being unhoused many times, dealing with mental health or addictions and the fallouts from different traumas, especially Indigenous people — Which by the way, in the city of Edmonton, 60% of people that are living unhoused are Indigenous people, despite Native people only making up 6% of the total population.

Taya Graham:  That’s incredible.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. Our people are very highly overrepresented in this situation, and they are roughed up by police on a continual basis.

The day before this happened, there was a young Blackfoot Dene man who was there just as an observer to support the campers. He’s a volunteer with the Bear Claw Patrol, which is an Indigenous-led organization that provides support and outreach to people living on the streets.

And he was arrested violently by police. Now, there is video footage that is circulated online about this whole experience. He had multiple officers piled on him. One officer had their knee on his neck. Very traumatic experience for him. So we know that this violence is there and we know that the potential is there for police to kill.

Even just in December, Edmonton City police shot and killed a young Indigenous man from Alexander First Nation on a wellness check. They shot him six times to death. And these are instances that are regular and the norm across the country for Indigenous people. So I felt that it’s my responsibility as a Native journalist who specializes in amplifying Indigenous experiences and stories to stay in that situation, to document what was going on.

Taya Graham:  Something that, as an American and a criminal justice system reporter here, I have a tendency to focus on what’s happening within our borders. But then I also saw William Ahmo, who was forced to the ground by correction officers, I think in 2021 at the Headland Correctional Center in Manitoba. So I’m seeing these instances of brutality that are recent and are startling on video, but I can only imagine that this issue of brutality started long before then. Can you talk a little bit about this brutality that we’re seeing aimed against Indigenous communities?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. This is something that Native people have experienced since the policing systems were established in Canada. It started with the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, that were established literally when this country was born. They were established to clear the plains of the “Indigenous problem”.

And all of these various policing systems stem from that oppressive and colonial system to enact the will of the interests of the state of Canada against Indigenous peoples, whether it was stealing Indigenous lands or porting our people onto reservations.

The policing system, the RCMP, played a role in forcibly removing Native children from their homes and sending them to Indigenous residential schools. There’s just a long and very troubled history between the police, between all of these various powers that be within this country.

Taya Graham:  I have to admit, as an American, I thought we cornered the market on police brutality, but it seems like there is a fair share in Canada as well.

So when I look at police brutality in the US, I would say, as a gross oversimplification, we see a lot of physical violence against minority communities in the cities, but we see economic violence against white folks and lower income folks in the more rural areas. So I’m just curious what police aggression and misconduct looks like in Canada.

Brandi Morin:  Wow. Okay. So when you’re saying economic, do you mean they’re more…?

Taya Graham:  So when I say economic violence, let me give you an example. In West Virginia, there’s a small town of Milton, about 2,500 people. And one of the things that was occurring was severe traffic enforcement, where people were just a taillight out, not having a license plate light over their tag, just these tiny things that were causing people to get these traffic fees.

And they would have court costs, their cars would get impounded, they might get an FTA for failing to appear, and it would just suck them into the system and bleed folks dry. Folks who maybe have $500 in their savings account now are completely wiped out. So that’s what I mean by that economic violence, where they’re pulled into the system and that they’re just constantly extracting wealth.

Brandi Morin:  From what I document and I witness, the tactics of police are more the physical violence and the rotating of people within these different systems. Like in Canada, the number of Indigenous people in the prison system is insanely high, even for women.

For Native women in Canada, they represent even more than Indigenous men in the prison system. They make up more than half of females in the prison system, but make up less than 5% of the total population. So this is a really widespread, systematic issue.

And then we have different policing systems that are tribally operating on different nations and different jurisdictional issues there, or communities trying to establish their own Indigenous justice systems.

But a lot of the violence is widespread. It doesn’t discriminate. They are targeted from coast to coast to coast in this country. From the beginning, the dominion of Canada established its army of a foreign force against Indigenous people to keep Indigenous people under its control through the RCMP and its foundational principles, which trickled out into all of these police forces under colonial rule.

Taya Graham:  That’s incredible. And I really appreciate you giving me this background, and also the folks who are listening, giving them this really important background to understand the root of this so, when we see these flashes of violence, we understand the history that lies behind it.

Something that I just couldn’t let go of, you mentioned that you were inside the tent, and there weren’t any mainstream media there. But when you popped out the tent, there was a bunch of mainstream media behind the yellow tape safely standing there. And I’m wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about the differences you might see in the narratives when mainstream media is covering the story of the encampments being torn apart versus an independent journalist like yourself, and a journalist who is from an Indigenous community, as well.

Brandi Morin:  They are doing the job that they’ve been trained to do, and they are telling these stories, a lot of the time, from that colonial status quo lens. They take, at face value, a lot of the time, the direction of police and the information from police and other authorities as to what is happening.

I do a lot of in-depth reporting. I was there inside with the experience of the people having an understanding of the culture, having an understanding of the discrimination and the different experiences that they are living through.

Honestly, though, when this was all going down, when I was inside, and arrested, the mainstream cameras, some of them were pointing at me as this was going down. Meanwhile, all of this chaos is happening with a group of people that are having this confrontation with the police, and people are being roughed up and taken down. And I was horrified and embarrassed and humiliated.

My dad called me later that night and said, hey, what’s happening? I saw you on the news and I saw them hollowing you away. What’s going on? What are you doing? I felt like I was some sort of renegade, and yet I felt that what I did in that moment was the right thing to do, that I wasn’t standing outside and behind these yellow lines to document from afar what was going on. But I was in there helping to give voice to the actual situation up close and not trying to focus in from afar.

But honestly, I heard from other journalists that had been covering these sweeps of the encampments that the police had previously been doing over the last couple of months, and they expressed frustration with the police for setting up these exclusion zones so that they couldn’t document what was happening.

Taya Graham:  It’s interesting, because you mentioned the camera focusing on you, you being taken away, and to me it sounds like, what I’m getting is sort of the sense that this was humiliating, that this was —

Brandi Morin:  Oh, absolutely.

Taya Graham:  So that disappoints me and surprises me a little bit because, usually, even mainstream media will acknowledge, hey, one of ours, a journalist got taken in by police. We’ve all had the experience — Or well, maybe it’s just independent journalists who’ve experienced this, of getting yelled at for having a camera out or trying to ask a question, be told to be pushed back, had our First Amendment rights infringed upon.

So I’m curious, do you feel like, when they reported on you, it was in the lens of solidarity, or do you think they were just simply pointing at you?

Brandi Morin:  It was pointing, and I honestly did feel like a criminal. However, that was happening on the scene. I have received an enormous amount of support from my colleagues at the Canadian Association of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and other organizations.

One of my good friends and colleagues who I’ve done extensive work with, by the way, we’ve won huge international awards for the work that we do, her name is Amber Bracken. Now, she had been embedded with Wet’suwet’en land defenders in November of 2022 and was arrested when the police came in there with assault rifles and attack guns to remove the land defenders. She was arrested and jailed for four days, and charged. This is something that she had experienced as well.

But it’s been a lot of different emotions. For me, I didn’t have the chance to go and take a breath. I needed to go back out there and finish the job that I was doing and chase the story and find out what was going on and happening with these people. I didn’t have a chance to unpack the experience.

And it hit me, it hit me days later, and I’m still dealing with it. It’s not fun, and I just want it to be behind me. I want to be able to do this work and be clear headed mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to be able to do it. And I wasn’t expecting to be affected as much as I have been by the situation.

Taya Graham:  I do absolutely understand that. A lot of time as journalists, we absorb things, and we keep absorbing them, and we don’t realize the full impact that they’re having upon us and on our spirits. That’s something that I’ve been recently dealing with because, for my line of work, I consume a lot of body camera footage, and also autopsy reports, and that’s something that I am still learning how to process.

But that brings me to another question I had about being an independent journalist, which is, as independent journalists, we have a different set of tools at our disposal than the mainstream media does. We may be small, but we’re nimble. We have connections to the community that they don’t.

So I’m wondering, we do have some things in our corner, but do you think the tools that you have as an independent journalist, do you think they’re working? Do you think it’s having a meaningful impact on the national conversation around these issues? Or do you feel that the mainstream media is still dominating?

Brandi Morin:  That is my hope. I’ve questioned a lot over the past week about the work that I do because I am extremely passionate and dedicated to this work. I’ve been doing it for 13-plus years. And I just called Amber last night, who had been arrested and jailed and went through this.

I called her. I was crying, and I said, is this worth it? Is this work even making a difference? Does anybody even give a crap? And she said, Brandi, just check your ego. Just, you got to step back and let the work speak for itself, and put it out there. I hope that it’s making a difference. I hope that this work is taken seriously, and I hope that me, as a journalist, and the work that I do is taken seriously, because I worry about the impact that this has had on my reputation and the work that I do.

Taya Graham:  As I was thinking about mainstream media, one of the things that mainstream media does well is they repeat, sometimes word for word, press releases or the word that comes down from City Hall. So in this case, Edmonton’s mayor has said that there should be a declaration of an emergency around homelessness.

And I would say, well, considering that there’s freezing temperatures, people could literally die from exposure, I think it’s fair to say that there should be an emergency. That’s an immediate crisis. But what do you think the actions of the city should be? Because the declaration of emergency that’s coming from your mayor may continue to take the actions of encampments being torn apart, people taken only to temporary shelters. What would you like to see your city do to help the unhoused folks of Edmonton?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah, I interviewed the grand chief of the Confederacy of Treaty Six just a couple of nights ago, and he was speaking to the intergenerational trauma that a lot of our people experience, and how important it is to address the crisis of the fallout of the Indian Residential School system and all of these different systemic injustices that our people continue to experience, and how the focus needs to be on providing the resources and Indigenous-led solutions for the healing of our people.

One thing that he said to me that really stood out was, how can we heal when we still have tears in our eyes? I think it would be helpful if a lot of these root issues were addressed, as well as the inadequacies in affordable housing and all of these complex intricacies in regards to funding shortfalls and such that are also service barriers.

Taya Graham:  Affordable housing is an issue that we have been struggling with in my city, Baltimore, as well. I remember speaking to Jeff Singer, who was the director of Health Care for the Homeless here, and a great advocate for the community.

I said, well, Jeff, what do we need to help the homeless in our city? He said, put them in homes. He said, and not shelters — Homes, permanent homes. That’s what you can do. Don’t create these barriers to entry. Give them the housing and the rest can follow. The getting well, the healing of various issues and various traumas that people have to process.

If you didn’t have trauma before you were on the street, you’ve got trauma now that you’ve lived on the street. You need time to process that. So he said, just get them into homes. The rest will follow and I’ve always remembered that Dr. Singer said that to me.

You mentioned the trauma of being jailed, being held, and you didn’t know when you were going to be let go. Having your power taken away by that is an incredibly dehumanizing experience. I know your first court appearance, I believe, is in February. What are you hoping for the outcome, or rather, what are you expecting to be the outcome from this process?

Brandi Morin:  Well, I’m hoping that the charges will be dropped and that I won’t have to go to court. I don’t want to show up to get fingerprinted before then and have my prints in their system. I am hoping that this will all be resolved so that I could just keep doing this work with a clear head.

Again, I don’t know. I don’t really know where they’re at, if they are planning to make an example out of the situation, or whether a prosecutor will look at this on his desk and say, well, this is not in the public interest to pursue these charges against a journalist, and throw it out, which I’m hoping will be the case.

Taya Graham:  Well, I know we’re hoping that will be the case as well. I just wanted to thank you so much for your time and for the incredible work that you’re doing helping to highlight voices that are not just often ignored, but are actually suppressed. I just want to thank you for doing that with so much strength and with so much eloquence.

For anyone who’s listening right now, please make sure to read Brandi Morin. Don’t just watch her documentaries, which are beautiful, but also read her. You’re an incredibly eloquent writer.

Brandi Morin:  Well, thank you. The first feature from the incidents that unfolded this last week is going to be published tomorrow, so please check that out. I bring you inside of the encampment, and you’ll get to know the people and be brought into the scenes of what went down there.

Taya Graham:  Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to reading it. And I want to thank you for sharing your experience that also shows the value of this journalistic freedom of independent journalism. We’re going to continue to follow your story, and we, of course, wish you the very best in your upcoming court appearance.

I want to thank whoever is listening right now for taking the time to listen. Whether you have our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, or you put your podcasts on when you’re commuting, or during the workday. We’re committed to bringing you independent journalism that’s ad-free that you can count on, and we care a lot about what we do.

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Colombia’s 60-year-long armed conflict has produced more than 177,000 civilian deaths, 25,000 disappeared people, and 5.7 million refugees. Multinational corporations operating in Colombia are responsible for 12,000 extra-judicial killings, 3,753 disappearances, and 1 million forced displacements. In the Northeast of the country, the Occidental Petroleum Corporation and its affiliate companies are being investigated for dozens of crimes and the forced displacement of farmers and Indigenous communities. Journalist and independent filmmaker Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi reports on the ground from “La Osa,” a rural area where 150 displaced families have returned to reclaim their land and to take on the oil companies that are trying to displace them again.

Produced, Filmed, & Edited by Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi

Transcript

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): Colombia’s 60-year-long armed conflict  has produced more than 177,000 civilian deaths, 25,000 disappeared people and 5.7 million refugees. Multinational corporations are responsible for 12,000 extra-judicial killings, 3,753 disappearances and 1 million forced displacements. In the northeast of the country, the Occidental Petroleum Corporation and its affiliate companies are being investigated for dozens of crimes and the forced displacement of farmers  and Indigenous communities.

In the area known as La Osa there are 150 families among the displaced. This is where they blocked the road, so that we wouldn’t pass… Today those families have returned to reclaim their land and the oil companies are trying to displace them again.

Jose Ordaz (La Osa farmer): The problem here  is that we were displaced from this land 19 years ago. With threats. Now we’re here to take it back, because we were never resettled. We waited for relocation for 19 years but they never gave it to us. So we came back to take our land again. That’s why we are here.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (filmmaker): Who displaced you?

Jose Ordaz (La Osa farmer): The Occidental Corporation in Colombia.  It forced us out of the land.

Juan Cruz (La Osa farmer): We cultivated 30 hectares. We have a bit of everything. We’re fighting for our lands… And we’ll stay here. We either stay here…  Or we go to heaven. The only way to leave is after death.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): Pressed by the oil company the local government sent a police inspector to deal with the farmers’ claim. The inspector brought the anti-riot police with him.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (filmmaker): How do you feel about them being here?

Maria Sogamoso (La Osa farmer): We feel bad because we just want to work our land here.  This land is ours and they come to force us to leave.

Camilo Cruz (La Osa farmer): We’re facing a difficult situation. Look at these guys in uniform. They are supposed to be the heroes of Colombia. They’ve come to beat us up, do you understand? So they first steal what’s ours. Now they want to defeat us using force. The “heroes of Colombia” sent by  the big corporations, brother!

Ana Ordaz (La Osa farmer): 30 years ago this was a lake. Look at it now.  Before this was a river. Big boats got through. Not only did people live off fishing but big boats carried yucca, plantain and goods. By exploiting our land to extract oil, the company dried out the rivers.

Ana Ordaz (La Osa farmer, speaking before the hearing): That’s the hearing with the police inspector and the anti-riot police. Film it if you want. 

Hector Gonzalez Torres (Oxy’s lawyer): The jurisdiction  to bring forward  this hearing was decided in a previous resolution.

Jesus Mancera (Ombudsman): You aim to enforce the evacuation using the police based on Decree 4-74 of 1992 to implement the eviction due to a ‘de facto’ occupation of the identified areas of the Caño Limon oil field. But that decree aims to protect farms in activity and this area is marked for reforestation, which means that I need to ask the police inspector to declare himself incompetent. Thank you, Mr. Inspector. 

Francisco Araya (Farmers’ lawyer): I’d like to denounce that the Secretary assisting the police inspector is an Occidental Petroleum employee.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): The unexpected presence of our film crew seemed to be fundamentally changing the dynamic of the proceedings.

Jose Gregorio Orduz (police inspector): To guarantee fairness, I will proceed to change Secretaries. I appoint as ad-hoc Secretary, Dr. Juliette. Please, take over.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): Off camera the Police Inspector asked us to leave the hearing. But the farmers’ lawyer reminded him that the hearing was of public interest.

Jose Gregorio Orduz (police inspector): I request a 10-minute break to announce my final decision.

Jesus Mancera (Ombudsman): In a shrewed way Occidental Petroleum tried to accelerate the process and invoked the wrong decree. Occidental says that this land is under environmental protection. If it’s environmentally protected then it can’t be exploited. So the case must be dismissed.

Camilo Cruz (La Osa farmer): Occidental Petroleum is damaging the land. We all see it. The only ones that don’t are those making money out of it. 

Raul Castro (Police Chief): Journalists shouldn’t be here!  So… Left to our own devices… Rest assured that we would have sorted this out… And journalists wouldn’t be here. 

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): The police chief then sent two officers to make threats to the camera crew. We requested the ombudsman to serve as a witness to the threats and the policemen stepped back. The police inspector had no choice  but to make a decision according to the law.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): The Colombian Armed Forces have a longstanding reputation for infringing upon the freedom of speech.The hearing finally resumed.

Jose Gregorio Orduz (police inspector): Taking into account the facts, we can determine that the land that is the object of the request by Oxy does not fulfill the requirements as this is not a land that’s being economically exploited which is an essential impediment to proceed with the claim.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): Despite their defeat, the oil company promised to appeal the police inspector’s decision. But it was a clear victory for the farmers who’d feared being displaced yet again.

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (filmmaker): You’ll remain here then.

Juan Cruz (La Osa farmer): We’ll stay here working the land.

Farmers: Long live the Cuban Revolution! Long-live the farmers!

Rodrigo Vazquez-Salessi (narrator): Justice seems to have prevailed, at least for now.

In Northern Alberta, Canada, sit the Athabasca tar sands—the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen, and a major driver of Canada’s economy. The vast majority of Canadian oil production comes from the extraction and processing of the crude bitumen found in the tar sands. But while Canada prospers off the tar sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta, have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. 

In a new feature documentary, Killer Water, award-winning journalist Brandi Morin and award-winning filmmaker/director Geordie Day delve deep into the heart of the environmental crisis plaguing the Alberta oil sands, uncovering the hidden truths that have long been ignored. The film exposes the detrimental impact of toxic tailings ponds leakage on the delicate ecosystems, water sources, and human life in and around Fort Chipewyan. Through stunning visuals and compelling narratives, Morin and Day take viewers on a journey that highlights the injustices faced by the Indigenous community living in the shadow of this industrial development.

Killer Water was produced in partnership with The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Studio Production: Geordie Day

Post-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

TRANSCRIPT

Brandi Morin:  This is a stretch of Lake Athabasca, in northern Alberta, Canada. Jason Castor is going as fast as he can, but the waters here are shallow, too shallow. If he slows down, his boat could get stuck in the mud, or even flip over. The water here is low due to industries drawing out water like the WAC Bennett Dam in British Columbia. The other culprits are climate change and the relentless industrial mining of the Alberta tar sands.

The Peace-Athabasca Delta is the second largest freshwater delta in the world. And under the delta is the world’s largest known reservoir of crude bitumen. A black, viscus, semi-solid form of petroleum, [bitumen] is the main component of Canadian oil production, growing from 48% of total production in 2008 to 73% in 2021 according to the Canada Energy Regulator. In 2021, crude bitumen production totaled about 3.3 million barrels per day, and in 2020, it was worth $42.7 billion in sales value.

But while Canada prospers off the oil sands industry, Indigenous communities downstream are in the grips of its toxic impact.

Jason Castor:  On the riverways, there’s this slurry of foam that looks like oil, or some kind of chemical in there. And they said it’s supposed to be safe to drink. So, I don’t know, would you feed your family this? I look at this stuff and most of the time, I find this substance in it, mixed with the foam itself. And once it dries, it doesn’t come off. You pressure wash it, it won’t come off.

Back in the day, elders used to take water, a cup in their boat, and they used to drink it. Nowadays, I wouldn’t want to drink this.

Brandi Morin:  Jason is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, ACFN for short, located in Fort Chipewyan. He’s been a traditional hunter, trapper, and fisherman for nearly 20 years. Over that time, he has documented strange changes in the water, the land, and even in the animals.

Jason Pastor:  And they say that it’s natural. Well, I know that that’s not natural, because I’ve been on the river my whole life.

Brandi Morin:  Jason worked as a heavy equipment operator for a major oil extraction company in the oil sands for several years. But over time, he says, being that close to the site of extraction gave him reasons to be unnerved.

Jason Pastor:  I was working out on site, and then, there’s so much things going on on site. There’s oil trucks moving around, and all the spills, and there’s always the smell of bitumen. I just felt sick to my stomach when I went to work [inaudible]. And in my mind, what am I doing to my land, or what I’m doing to our water?

Brandi Morin:  Jason was raised in the foster care system, away from Fort Chipewyan, after both of his parents died while ice fishing on Lake Athabasca when he was young. Then, nearly 20 years ago, Jason moved his wife and children back to Fort Chipewyan, and did the hard work of learning a traditional lifestyle, the lifestyle his ancestors created over countless generations. But those traditions are now at risk.

When you were a kid, did you swim in the lake?

Jason Pastor:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  And now…?

Jason Pastor:  Now I don’t go in the water. I just don’t.

Brandi Morin:  What about your kids? Do you tell them not to?

Jason Pastor:  I don’t take them on the lake over there. I take them elsewhere. I tell them, ‘You don’t go swimming at the dock, you don’t go swimming at the beach park, you don’t go swimming anywhere around here. You want to go, we go to Inland Lake, or I’ll take you way up the lake to the beaches.’

Brandi Morin:  That life-giving, life-sustaining river is now a little more than a transportation route. When he travels the river to pick up supplies or visit friends in Fort McMurray, Jason doesn’t take his hunting or fishing equipment anymore.

Jason Pastor:  From this area, I usually hunt for another… about 40 minutes, and I won’t go any further. That’s my area of hunting. Even though my reserve is still up here, ACFN Reserve, I choose not to go hunting in that area because the oil plants are getting closer. When we get so close to the oil and gas, we have animals, they’ll be just walking right along the bank. And it seems like they just know that we’re not going to hunt them, because we already passed our buffer zone and put our guns away, and we decided we’re not hunting in that area because there’s too much contaminants. They know, because they know we’re not going to hunt them.

Brandi Morin:  Jason and other local residents have suspected pollution from the oil sands has been affecting them for years. Their fears aren’t unfounded. It is well documented that the people of Fort Chipewyan have been struck by disproportionately high rates of cancer, and their proximity to the tar sands has long been the suspected dominant factor contributing to their sickness. And a recent tailings pond spill reiterated their concerns.

In February, Indigenous communities downstream from Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine, about 75 kilometers upstream of Fort Chipewyan, learned of a massive spill of 5.3 million liters, or 1.4 million gallons, from the mine’s tailing area. Oil sands tailings are where the mining companies store the byproducts of the oil sands mining and extraction process, including water, sand, clay, residual bitumen, and various chemicals.

Imperial Oil’s Kearl Mine spill was one of the largest releases of toxic tailings in Alberta’s history. However, Fort Chipewyan’s leadership was only made aware of the toxic spill through an environmental protection order, issued by the Alberta Energy Regulator, that called on the company to immediately contain and remediate the spill on Feb. 6. Then, in March, the Canadian press obtained a document that showed the province stalled the initiation of an emergency response for a month.

Meanwhile, Indigenous leaders found out that another tailings pond at the same Kearl Mine site had been leaking for at least nine months prior to the major incident in February.

Soon after the incident, Environment and Climate Change Canada launched a formal investigation into potential violations of the Fisheries Act by Imperial Oil.

Speaker 1:  …An official investigation into the Imperial Oil Kearl Facility.

Chief Allan Adam:  For some reason, it has become my job to come to this place in order to remind this government and its duties and its responsibilities. Your responsibility for properly regulating massive industry projects that potentially threaten the health and safety of Fort Chipewyan and other downstream communities. For 10 months, this leak went unreported, despite the Alberta Regulator and the oil sands operators being fully aware of what was going on.

Brandi Morin:  But the nightmare didn’t end there. Just one month after the Kearl Mine spill, Suncor reported 6 million liters of tailings water that exceeded sediment guidelines were released into the Athabasca River from its Fort Hills oil sands mine. Imperial Oil maintains its spill did not affect nearby waterways or wildlife.

Brad Corson:  Monitoring continues to show there have been no impacts to local drinking water sources, and there is no indication of impact to wildlife.

Brandi Morin:  But the AAR’s own tests indicated the presence of industrial wastewater in a fish-bearing waterbody near the mine, and subsequent testing detected F2 hydrocarbons at levels exceeding the surface water quality guidelines for the protection of freshwater aquatic life. Still, the AER claimed in April there was no indication of a change in drinking water, and no adverse impacts to fish or wildlife had been observed.

Laurie Pushor:  …We have had no test results that suggest any of those compounds have left Waterbody Three.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam doesn’t buy that, and he’s not alone.

Francis Scarpaleggia:  The lake, which feeds into a tributary of the Firebag River, also contains naphthenic acids, which are formed from the breakdown of petrochemicals, et cetera.

Heather McPherson:  You are finding toxins outside of the Kearl site, there is an impacted area, and you are continuing to allow Imperial Oil to put tailings into that system.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam says his band is preparing a lawsuit against the company in the provincial and federal governments.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what government forms, or what government’s in place, when your back is up against a circle of a wall, try to find the curve, and I’ll put you there. But right now, that’s where they’re at, and there’s nowhere for them to go.

From ACFN’s point of view, how the justice scale goes, we will find out, because that’s where we’re going. And this is going to court.

Brandi Morin:  Is there a lawsuit launched, or —

Chief Allan Adam:  It’s going to happen, yeah. And it’s not going to look good for anybody, and it’s not going to look good for Canada, and it’s not going to look good for Alberta. But Alberta will fight. But Canada will buckle. And we can’t allow our water to be tainted.

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam has been fighting this fight for decades. He’s been ACFN’s elected chief for almost 16 consecutive years, and he became internationally recognized for speaking out about the adverse impacts of the oil sands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Climate change has affected our people in more ways than one, with the depletion of our water, the drying up of our ecosystem in regards to one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world.

Brandi Morin:  Celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young, Jane Fonda, James Cameron, Desmond Tutu, and Greta Thunberg have visited Fort Chipewyan to help amplify the concerns.

Greta Thunberg:  Yeah, we continue the struggle, and yeah, we won’t give up.

Chief Allan Adam:  And neither will we.

Brandi Morin:  Then, in 2018, chief Adam announced he wanted to either buy a stake in Canada’s federally-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, or partner to build another future line.

Chief Allan Adam:  We want to be owners of a pipeline. We think that the pipeline is the most critical component to the oil and gas sector, especially from this region, and if Fort McMurray and Alberta wants to survive, the Athabasca Tribal Council has to be alongside both Alberta and Canada to make it run.

Brandi Morin:  He was labeled a sellout by some people, who claimed he abandoned the cause. But Adam said he couldn’t stop the oil industry, and he was tired of fighting against it, so he switched tactics to ensure his community at least receives long-overdue financial compensation.

Chief Allan Adam:  The sad scenario is that I would have loved to fight, and I still love to fight today, but there has to be a time when you have to draw the line.

Brandi Morin:  Then in 2020, Chief Adam again made international headlines when he was brutally arrested and beaten by RCMP officers in Fort McMurray for an expired license plate. Several months later, charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer were dropped against him, following public backlash when footage of the incident was released [muffled shouting].

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:  We have all now seen the shocking video of Chief Adam’s arrest, and we must get to the bottom of this.

Chief Allan Adam:  If I had my way, in five years, the RCMP should be gone from all Native reserves across the country.

Brandi Morin:  Amidst all this, the chief never gave up caring about what happens to his homelands.

Chief Allan Adam:  Regardless of what and who we say we are, we have to work together as a community to stand as one, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to survive here in this community. How you say it, [speaking Dene]?

[Speaking Dene] means, I love you. I love you. That’s what that means. [Speaking Dene], I love you with all my heart, I guess the old timers would say, back in the day.

They could be giants and walk over us and everything, but you take out their knees, they will fall. Because our treaty trumps everything. We have legal rights, we have legal position, we have legal title, and we never, ever surrendered anything.

Brandi Morin:  What about Premier Smith? Have you ever had any convos with her? Because from what I understand, she was downplaying the seriousness of these spills, and the impacts, and she’s very, very pro-industry.

Premier Danielle Smith:  Nobody wants to feel like they have potentially been drinking water that has been exposed, and I’m pleased to report that none of this spill got into the tributaries.

Chief Allan Adam:  She hasn’t answered my text message that I sent to her when she was running for the Premier’s office and everything, and until today, she hasn’t answered my text. But I know she’s got it, because I have her cell number that goes right to the Premier’s office.

Brandi Morin:  What did you say in the text?

Chief Allan Adam:  I just told her straight out, ‘You want to continue this to go on? Well, then, give us 10% of all revenue sharing within Treaty Eight territory. That’s within a fair reason, and you don’t even have to back pay us. Just pay us up today.’ When times like this are happening, where homes are being destroyed by wildfire and everything and stuff like that because of climate change of development and everything. I raised the alarm years ago when I said that one day we’ll become environmental refugees. Where are we now?

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is growing frustrated with the encroaching threats to his community, threats that he believes are linked to industrial development. Like a wildfire that forced the entire community of Fort Chipewyan to be evacuated in May.

Premier Danielle Smith:  The fire danger level remains extreme in the North.

Speaker 8:  Smoke is seen billowing over the horizon as an out-of-control wildfire inches closer to the community. Residents of Fort Chipewyan forced to evacuate.

Speaker 9:  There are only two ways out of Fort Chipewyan: the first by plane. The Canadian Armed forces provided a Hercules aircraft and a convoy of flights took more than 500 people to nearby Fort McMurray. The second way out, by boat. Volunteers shuttled residents late into the night to hotel rooms once they got to safety.

Chief Allan Adam:  I’m Chief Allan Adam, and it’s 4:34. This is the last of the evacuees, and as you see in the background, we got the fire burning. We’re going to stay behind, and we’re going to help protect the community in ways that we can. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything. We got this. You guys take care.

Brandi Morin:  The CEO of Imperial Oil apologized for the toxic spills to Canadian lawmakers in Ottawa last April.

Brad Corson:  I am deeply apologetic for what has happened at Kearl. We are committed to correcting this situation and ensuring it does not happen again.

Brandi Morin:  The president of the AER also issued an apology.

Laurie Pushor:  It is clear that neither Imperial nor the AER met community expectations to ensure they’re fully aware of what is and what was happening, and for that, I am truly sorry.

Brandi Morin:  [Drum beating] But the damage is done, and Chief Adam has lost trust in all stakeholders involved.

Chief Allan Adam:  When you look at your grandchildren and everything, and you say, ‘Is that my legacy that’s going to continue to happen?’ And yet, we’re watching our own grandchildren, our own kids, pass away with diseases of cancer and everything, and we can’t do nothing.

15 years ago and everything, when we first brought it out to the public about what was going on here, just because nobody talks about it? It’s still going on, it’s still happening. People are still being diagnosed with cancer, but we live it because it’s our normal.

Brandi Morin:  Back in April, when Chief Adam testified in Ottawa, he learned his father-in-law had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  My father-in-law today is going to get his results back. Because they found a big growth in his liver last week, of cancer. And I’m supposed to be with my wife, to be with her, to comfort her when she hears this news. But I’m here giving testimony to all of everybody across Canada about the issue, about what’s going on in our community.

Brandi Morin:  I watched when you were testifying to the Environmental Committee in Ottawa, you were talking about the cancers, and you said, nobody ever brings this up anymore. And you said, my own father-in-law is being tested.

Chief Allan Adam:  Well, we got the results back then. But yesterday, because my wife don’t fly, and the water being low—because BC Hydro Site C is filling up right now and reducing our water level—we have a hard time traveling. My wife has to make a decision now, because yesterday, the doctor told us, ‘Expect one month to one year.’

Brandi Morin:  Chief Adam is familiar with the pain of losing loved ones, including his own father, to cancer.

Chief Allan Adam:  I went through that moment, and my dad went through this process. I had to make a decision as a Chief back then. What do I do? Do I run the Nation, or do I step aside? I stepped aside for six months and spent time with my dad.

Everything inside, everything that’s here, will affect people, regardless of what. And my father-in-law lived off the land all his life. He still goes out in the bush today. He’s 88 years old. He just came back yesterday from the bush. Can’t stop him. His love for the land is who he is. And like I said, it all connects together, everything connects. The water, the land, and the people.

[Drumming and singing]

Water’s everything, water’s life. It gives life to everything that we thrive on, everything that we believe the Creator gave to us.

When we were young, when we were growing up, when my mother and dad took us out in the land, we didn’t have a deep freeze, but our deep freeze was right here, and it was fresh. Within the year, I probably take, probably about, maybe four fish. And yet, fish is the healthiest thing that you could eat.

Brandi Morin:  How has your community, the people here, how have they responded to the news of the tailing spills? Are they scared?

Chief Allan Adam:  Yeah, we’re scared. Well, I’ll say that for a fact.

Brandi Morin:  How do you [crosstalk]?

Chief Allan Adam:  My name is Allan Adam. I’m the chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. When it comes to the water issue, I am very scared, because it has never been resolved, and it has never been talked about ever since we raised the issue. But it’s still there. The innocent killer. Looks so beautiful, but yet, it’s a killer.

Well, good afternoon, everyone. I just want to pass on a message. My wife lost her father today.

Brandi Morin:  Dr. John O’Connor, who worked as a physician in Fort Chipewyan for nearly 16 years, alerted officials years ago about the disproportionately high rates of both rare and common cancers among community members.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Within the first couple of years, it was sort of plain to me that this community of 1,200 people, had a lot of illness. And then, as I got to know the community more, and trust was established, it dawned on me. It was quite a shock.

Cancer and autoimmune diseases, of a type and number that I really wasn’t seeing in my large practice in Fort McMurray. They hunt, they trapped, and gathered. They were very well established, very self-contained and contented. This made it all the more sort of alarming for me.

As the years went by, it dawned on me that this was probably preconceived. I thought this was something that was already in the vocabulary, in their lexicon, and I just happened to touch a raw nerve with them, because there was no undue alarm. The facts were there for all to see, documented. And not just by me, by the Provincial Health Authority. They were obviously hiding something. They were protecting Big Oil, Big Fossil.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. When you learned of this big leak that Imperial Oil had covered up for nine months, and then this huge leak that it had earlier this year, and then Suncor a month later, what did you think when you learned that?

Dr. John O’Connor:  My first thought when I heard about these leaks that weren’t reported or were covered up was, ‘Who’d be surprised at this?’ It set me thinking and looking back to the late ’90s. Back then, they had public hearings. And at one of them, Suncor admitted that their oldest pond had been leaking at an alarming rate, for years, directly into the water table.

There are carcinogenic chemicals in these tailings ponds that, individually, are Class One carcinogens for humans and animals. There are chemicals science is unsure of the impact of when they’re mixed, the soup that’s created by these tailings ponds. There’s also, even more alarming, endocrine disruptors that are leaching directly into the environment, into the water, that are impacting fish. And, of course, fish [are] a staple diet in Fort Chip. And, of course, these fish are being caught with missing parts and growths and stuff.

Brandi Morin:  What do you think about children being diagnosed with cancer? You hear of adults and things being diagnosed, but when it’s kids, it’s like, wow.

Dr. John O’Connor:  Cancer in children in a setting like that, Brandi, represents the canary in the mine. The other health issues that are in Fort Chip are red flags. Children getting cancer should be a siren. It should be a four-alarm fire siren. And I don’t hear any concern being expressed by anyone in a position of authority, either federally or provincially.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that that is to protect the interests of industry?

Dr. John O’Connor:  I think industry is untouchable. It owns this province, controls everything.

Calvin Waquan:  I see this lake as something that teaches me a lot of lessons. It’s my fridge, it’s my classroom, it’s my history book. It’s my solitude.

Brandi Morin:  Mikisew Cree member Calvin Waquan utilizes Lake Athabasca and its river systems on a regular basis. Calvin moved home to Fort Chipewyan after his father was murdered in Edmonton in 2014, because he wanted to reconnect with his ancestral homeland.

Calvin Waquan:  You see the beauty of our community, but that all comes with a cost. And it all comes with the thought of being sick one day.

Brandi Morin:  And even kids are getting cancer?

Calvin Waquan:  Oh yeah, for sure. My son had two friends who recently had cancer, and the same age, 10 years old.

Brandi Morin:  From here?

Calvin Waquan:  From here, yeah, and people recently dying of cancers. And that scares me. It scares my wife.

Brandi Morin:  The rates are incredibly high because of how small this community is.

Calvin Waquan:  It is. It’s astronomical. When someone like Dr. O’Connor or somebody blows the whistle, they get threatened to take their job away, or to silence them because of the almighty dollar, but where’s our share? Where’s the royalties? Where’s something that’s going to create sustainability, something that’s going to create sovereignty for our people?

My wife wanted to move away from here, and me not wanting to be here anymore, but I want to be here with my people and with my granny, and beside my father that I buried nine and a half years ago. Yeah, I could see him out my backyard in my window.

But it’s getting to a point where I don’t know if I want to stick around because young guys like me are dying from cancers, and older people are passing away, and it’s sad to see. And is it the meat? Is it the fish? Is it the air? Is it the plants? It’s everything. It’s the medicines. It’s everything—everything that we trusted in before we are guessing at now. When I’m burying my papa and my uncle and cousins and seeing other people die from rare cancers, bile duct cancers, you can’t tell me there’s something not wrong here.

Brandi Morin:  Does it bother you when you’re out here and you’re trying to enjoy that, and you’re thinking, well, it’s being poisoned?

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, it gets me sometimes, I guess, when I’m seeing the slicks in different bays and coves. And it shouldn’t be on our minds to second guess if we’re going to eat the fish out of the water.

Brandi Morin:  After he learned of the Kearl tailing spill, Calvin showed up to a town hall held by Imperial Oil holding a water bottle tainted with motor oil and presented it to Jamie Long, Imperial Oil’s vice president of mining.

Calvin Waquan:  Now my kids that are in the back have to live with this for the next generation to come. You know what? I was going to pour this all over the projector so it would leak down the screen. That screen and that lens that I was going to pour the oil on? That fits our traditional way of life, and how you’ve tarnished it. No thanks [applause].

I was pretty riled up, as you can see. And I walked in there pretty calm, and I just told them how I felt, and I guess how my ancestors have been trying to tell people from the beginning. Just like my granny and my kôkom [grandma], Mary Rose said, enough is enough, and I just had enough. I saw my little girl there, my boy. Once industry is affecting the serenity of that and the beauty of this water and these lands, I’m going to stand up and be a warrior for my people today and tomorrow, and for every day to come.

Brandi Morin:  It’s just heartbreaking, though, at the same time.

Calvin Waquan:  Yup.

Brandi Morin:  My God, this is your traditional land. Chief Adam has told me more than once that you’ll be climate refugees.

Calvin Waquan:  Yeah, we will. Yeah. We’re going to lose the way that our ancestors left for us. And they meant for us to walk on the land and the water farther than they did, but not to this extent, to move away from home.

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello]. Hi, Ian.

Ian Peace:  Tân’si [hello].

Brandi Morin:  Ian Peace, an environmental scientist who lived and worked in northern Alberta, including Fort Chipewyan for several years, wrote a thesis about leaking tailings in the oil sands in 2019.

Ian Peace:  We found results from the experiment that we did that would suggest there was process-affected water making its way from the tails impoundment area down to the river. It’s pretty widely agreed that naphthenic acids are the main toxicant of concern. And I did a little bit of number crunching on this, and between Suncor and Syncrude, there is at least 200,000 kilograms per day of naphthenic acids being discharged to tailing ponds. And that is a substance that’s been shown to kill fish in concentrations as low as 20 milligrams per liter.

So here goes all those tailings into the tailings pond, and most of the water drained out the bottom, leaving behind the sludge accumulation. The main contaminant is naphthenic acids, the one that everybody agrees is the biggest concern. It’s expressing to the river in almost the same amounts that are already dissolved into the tailings water.

Brandi Morin:  Do you think that the Alberta government and industry, do you think that they downplay the impacts, specifically, I guess, on the river, and with these leaking tailings?

Ian Peace:  Yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s very clear. You can see that it’s downplayed tactically and strategically. There’s no doubt. They don’t look for a number of compounds, and they don’t look in the areas where they might find it. And it’s been an effective strategy.

Brandi Morin:  There’s a big void when it comes to the knowledge of the combination of the chemicals in tailings, and how those chemicals affect human health.

Mandy Olsgard:  Hello?

Brandi Morin:  Tân’si [hello], Mandy, this is Brandi. How are you?

Mandy Olsgard:  Hi, I am good. Just got a little delayed on my drive, so sorry. I’m going to be in my car.

Brandi Morin:  No, it’s no problem.

Mandy Olsgard is an environmental toxicologist. She studies how chemicals affect people and the environment. She’s worked to assess water contamination for the AER and various First Nation communities throughout her career, including Fort Chipewyan.

Mandy Olsgard:  When they do an assessment so that they can approve an oil sands mine, they assess the risks to human health. There is then no regulatory body that is responsible for community or human health once that project is approved. We only manage human health through the environment —

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  …And environmental quality monitoring. So there’s this gap between what we predicted as a risk to human or Indigenous community health, and then how we monitor that during the life of a project. So it’s not shocking that communities are bringing these concerns forward, whether it’s odors from air emissions, deposition of dust, changes to wildlife and plants.

Brandi Morin:  The issue at hand is proving whether the higher rates of cancer are linked to the oil sands. The provincial and federal governments have said multiple water tests they conducted found no evidence of contamination of waterways near the Kearl mine.

Laurie Pushor:  There has been no evidence presented that this reached the waterway.

Brandi Morin:  But the ACFN, the Mikisew Cree, and Meti governments in Fort Chipewyan don’t trust those findings. So they’ve been conducting their own tests at their water treatment plant. Yet, Mandy said those standard water inspections are inadequate because tests for certain chemicals are not conducted.

Mandy Olsgard:  But we’ve never really linked that to how it changed human health and the condition of human health. There’s studies that have shown chemical concentrations are elevated. So that’s why when people come at anyone and say, ‘Oh, but we’re cleaning up the world’s largest oil spill,’ that’s all bunk.

So they’re not. They process the oil sands, and they release different types of chemicals, different forms of those chemicals, and sometimes novel chemicals. They have introduced polyacrylamide and acrylamide into the environment there as use for flocculants in tailings ponds, for things that make the tailings come together and sink to the bottom to clarify the water cap.

Brandi Morin:  Wow.

Mandy Olsgard:  So there’s novel chemicals, there’s increased concentrations. They change the oxidation state of metals — and that’s important, because how bioavailable, how easily a human can absorb something, depends on the oxidation state. So when people are saying, ‘This was natural,’ no, it’s not.

Brandi Morin:  Tar does naturally exist along the Athabasca’s rivers, banks, and tributaries. Its black goo seeping from the shores, has been recorded by local Indigenous tribes for millennia, and as early as the 1700s by settler explorers. But the naturally-occurring tar isn’t what these issues are about.

Mandy Olsgard:  Development changed it fundamentally, and that’s what we need to focus on. Did it change it to the point enough that it’s affected human health? Those increased rates of cancer, mental health? That’s all in there. But I’ve never seen Alberta Health or the provincial government do anything for communities based on that report, or try and figure out why.

Brandi Morin:  I don’t even trust them. Look at what the AER has done, and…

Mandy Olsgard:  I know. I worked there. I don’t anymore. I get it.

Margo Vermillion:  [Singing].

Brandi Morin:  Marco Vermilion is a Dene Cree elder who grew up in Fort Chipewyan. She was shattered to learn of the tailing spills.

Margo Vermillion:  When I heard, actually, about the oil spill, my heart was so sore. When I was little, I used to come down to the waters with pails of water to bring home to drink. It was clean water back then. Everything was so much more healthier.

Today, you look at our water, and it’s sad. You can feel the sadness from them. You can feel that they’re crying for… Sorry, I just get so emotional, because I really believe that our waters are crying for us to help them, like everything else. Everything else that’s connected to the waters, it’s our plants and our trees and our insects. They’re also crying.

I went down to the lake, and as I was walking down the shore, what a beautiful eagle feather that I had found, on my birthday—I was gifted with a feather. Then I thought, well, I’m just going to walk over the hill, so I walked over the hill. Brandi, you wouldn’t believe… You could almost feel that the trees and the plants were in mourning. They were mourning because of the burnt, them being burnt, right?

And I sang for them. I sang, because I really felt their sadness too. So I felt their sadness of the destruction that’s happening to our earth. I think that, you know what? Again, it’s men, it’s human beings that are making all of this destruction happen.

[Drumming and singing] I don’t have no faith whatsoever in industry. How can we in the community have faith in them? They’ve broken promises, their words mean nothing. If they came and they decided to live here in the community and to be amongst us, to experience what it is that we experience, maybe I’ll listen to them.

Brandi Morin:  Exactly. But they were already covering up that spill for months or more before. They didn’t even tell you.

Margo Vermillion:  Yeah, and they didn’t say a word to the community. I don’t know anymore. I mean, you know what? When they investigate their own self like that, nothing really happens. We don’t need scientists to tell us. We have the proof here. We have our elders that talk about the changes that they see. That’s our scientists. But now, today, nowadays, if you don’t have your papers in being a scientist, nothing else is true, right?

Brandi Morin:  Meanwhile, Chief Adam isn’t convinced Imperial Oil has fully contained the Kearl mine leak, and the AER absolved itself of any wrongdoing when it released its report of its internal investigation into the spills in late September. Now, Chief Adam is determined to keep the pressure on industry, the AER, and governments to ensure they rectify their shortfalls.

Chief Allan Adam:  This is a wakeup call for Canada, and this is a wakeup call for Alberta. And this is a downfall for the AER, because they failed to uphold the protection of this community. They created a big mess, and the big mess is going to be, one day, revealed in the courts, and this is where it’s all going to, regardless of… The Alberta government can’t continue to run the AER as its own, what you’d call the gunslinger of the West.

Brandi Morin:  But even the fact that the feds are even considering allowing them to release so-called “treated” tailings into the river, that is unacceptable, as well, you’ve said.

Chief Allan Adam:  It is unacceptable, and we’re not going to accept it. Turn the tap on and find out.

Brandi Morin:  Despite all this, the feds are actually considering adopting regulations for the release of so-called “treated oil sands mining wastewater” into the Athabasca River. The new regulations are expected to be finalized by 2025.

It’s so crazy, because they don’t even know how to deal with the tailings and stuff that they already have. They’re scrambling. ‘What do we do? How do we get rid of this?’ Now, they’re proposing to the government to let them release it, because they say it’s safe and treated now, into the river. They can’t even contain what they have.

It’s astonishing that in such a small, isolated community, pretty much everyone I’ve talked to here has a loved one that’s died from cancer.

Jason Pastor:  Our people don’t really die of old age no more, more of a cancer. People don’t die naturally as they used to. I can’t speak for everybody, but I know on my side of my family, I had about four or five people, my own personal loved ones, that passed away from some cancers, and that made me have mixed feelings about this area.

Brandi Morin:  Water, the life giver, the one necessity Jason and others here make sure to stock up on in bottled form when out on the territory.

Jason Pastor:  You see [inaudible], there’s a whole story I was told, you see, about water. When you’re out of supplies, you usually go home from the bush. If you go berry picking or you go in the bushes, usually, you run out of supplies, you go home. Nowadays, if you run out of water, you have no choice to go home.

Brandi Morin:  The AER declined an interview request, citing the ongoing investigation into the tailing spills. Imperial Oil did not respond to requests for an interview.

I’m Brandi Morin, reporting in the unceded territories of the Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree, and Metis nations, for The Real News Network, IndigiNews, and Ricochet Media.

This story was co-produced by The Real News, Ricochet Media, and IndigiNews.

In Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, a fight for our future is playing out between local Indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities hellbent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, but for more than two years several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. The Thacker Pass Project is backed by the Biden administration, and companies like General Motors have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the project, looking to capitalize on the transition to a “green energy economy,” for which lithium is essential. While it is a vital component in the manufacturing of electric vehicles and batteries, though, there’s nothing “green” about mining lithium. Ending our addiction to fossil fuels is urgently necessary, but the struggle of the local tribes around Thacker Pass reveals the dark side of a “green revolution” that prioritizes profits and consumption over everything (and everyone) else.

In this feature documentary, Thacker Pass – Mining the Sacred, award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French multimedia journalist Brandi Morin and documentary filmmaker Geordie Day report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. 

Thacker Pass – Mining the Sacred was co-produced by Ricochet Media, IndigiNews, and The Real News Network.

Pre-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Studio Production: Geordie Day

Post-Production: Brandi Morin, Geordie Day, Ethan Cox, Andrea Houston, Cara McKenna, Eden Fineday, Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara

Transcript

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Rugged. Serene. A vast stretch of parched desert in SoCal Northern Nevada captivates the senses. The low desert valleys are wide and expansive. I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains “white gold” lithium and lots of it, the new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine which will operate for the next 41 years. It sits inside an extinct supervolcano basin named the McDermott Caldera, formed over 16 million years ago. The company is backed by the Biden administration and touts General Motors as its biggest investor, $650 million to be exact. But for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action.

In June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the US government did not violate federal environmental laws when it approved the mine. Soon after that ruling, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department raided and dismantled an Indigenous resistance camp named Ox Sam, forbidding land defenders and water defenders from accessing the construction area. When I showed up, construction workers immediately called security [end of voiceover].

How’s it going?

Security Guard:  Good. How are you?

Brandi Morin:  Good. I’m Brandi.

Security Guard:  You’re Brandi?

Brandi Morin:  Brandi, yes.

Security Guard:  All right, nice to meet you.

Brandi Morin:  We’re journalists. How are you?

Security Guard:  Good. From where?

Brandi Morin:  We’re actually from Canada. We’re on assignment with Ricochet Media, IndigiNews, and The Real News. So, we’re doing a story about Thacker Pass and Indigenous opposition to it. So, we wanted to come and check it out.

Security Guard:  It’s all good. Just so you know, this whole dozer path, all the way to the creek up over the hill, that is private property. But yeah –

Brandi Morin:  Oh. So, right here?

Security Guard:  – I see you’re not on it, so no, you’re fine. This is a BLM road.

Brandi Morin:  Right. So, are you here all the time, security? Do they have this because of the blockaders and stuff? Do they have security to make sure that people aren’t coming to obstruct? Or is that –

Security Guard:  I’m not sure what you’re asking.

Brandi Morin:  – Are they employing security here full-time?

Security Guard:  That’s something you could ask Lithium Americas.

Brandi Morin:  Oh, okay.

Security Guard:  I can give you their phone number.

Brandi Morin:  Okay.

[Voiceover] That same security guard followed us down the highway [end of voiceover].

We want to go to Thacker Pass.

Security Guard:  Oh, that’s it.

Brandi Morin:  Yeah. And is that more Lithium Americas construction site as well up there?

Security Guard:  Yeah.

Brandi Morin:  Okay. I might just drive up to the gate. Okay. Thanks.

Security Guard:  Thank you.

Brandi Morin:  He was totally following us, although he’s trying to act nice to tell us where the road is, but he’s following us.

[Voiceover] A lot is at stake here for the company, its investors, and a myriad of government and business interests looking to capitalize on the transition to a “green energy economy” for which lithium is essential. It is costing over $2.2 billion to build the Thacker Pass mine. But don’t let the prospect of green energy fool you, this mine will stretch to nearly 6,000 acres and dig an open pit to a depth of 400 feet. The project requires tailings piles and processing facilities, including a sulfur plant. The sulfur is, itself, a waste byproduct from oil refineries and it will be trucked in by the tons and burned every day at the mine site. The project will also use more than 1.7 billion gallons of water per year in the driest state in America.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Oh hey.

It’s like the end game for us as humans, not even me as an Indigenous person. And that treaty acknowledges that two-thirds of Nevada is Shoshone land which, of course, it’s not anymore. They’ve used it for nuclear testing and they always want to do toxic waste storage and open-pit mining now. It’s the wrong thing to do to the animals, to the plants, to the Earth. We keep tearing up the planet where we live as a whole, whether it be other types of mining or logging and oil extraction, fracking; It’s all shortsighted.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] She’s speaking about the rush to get off fossil fuels and transition to so-called “greener alternatives.” While ending our addiction to fossil fuels is, of course, urgently necessary, the voices of the local tribes here are getting lost in the politics of what green energy actually means. While it’s an essential component used in electric vehicles and batteries, there’s nothing green about mining lithium. Mining is mining, no matter what the resource being extracted is. It’s always going to be devastating to the environment.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  This helps get us through a lot of winters. Its common name is Indian rice grass. See these little seeds?

Brandi Morin:  Yeah.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  They’re really, really, highly nutritious. That was my whole thing with Thacker Pass: It’s like you go out there and you don’t see anything. Well, that’s because you don’t know how to look, you don’t have the right eye.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she’s spoken out to protect it at the mine site. Now, Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors, in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing, and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company [end of voiceover].

 I wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Oh, man. I don’t even remember. Is it civil something? Trespassing? It’s something about disobedience. I don’t know. I didn’t read the papers. I threw them in a drawer. And to think that it’s going to be a big open-pit mine is hard. And that’s our ancestral homeland. That’s our bones and our blood; deep, deep in that soil. I can almost see what’s really there on the other side of the spiritual curtain when I’m there. But you can feel them out there with you. And to be looking at the same stars and seeing the same moon and knowing that my kids’ kids will never see those stars from that same place, honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop them. There are 500 lithium mines coming. I wanted my descent on record as an Indigenous mother.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] It was gut-wrenching to hear her say that, yet inspiring. Despite the insurmountable odds, she’s still willing to put it all on the line to try and save her sacred territory.

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  I don’t care if people don’t like me, or the corporations… Or I look like I’m [sniffles] doing nonsense. I do what I think is right. That’s all I can do.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] There’s another more chilling reason the mine area is sacred. The native tribes call Thacker Pass by its Paiute name: Peehee Mu’huh, meaning “rotten moon.” The name stems from a massacre that happened there, before European contact, in a crescent-shaped area of the valley. Elders have passed down the tale of the bloody killings of Paiute men, women, and children, by an enemy tribe over generations. They say attackers gutted the dead and threw their insides onto the sagebrush. When the bodies were discovered by Paiute men who had been away hunting, the stench of the rotting flesh was so strong, that they named the spot Rotten Moon. The violence only got worse, of course, when the colonizers arrived.

Dean Barlese:  It was a really rugged time. The military came through and killed. To save bullets, a lot of times, they would take the young people and bash in the back of their heads. And I know that because our oral history says this is how the military caught our people and treated our people. They fought hard against the military. They didn’t want to lose their land. And the government, military, wanted to get rid of the Paiute people, so they massacred them wherever they found them. It was a five-year war. Snake War, they called it.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] He is also facing charges from Lithium Americas.

Dean Barlese:  There you go. Go ahead and… You probably understand that better than I could. They’re restraining us from prayer, keeping us from praying up there. We’re still in the Indian wars. I made that statement before too. Our Indian wars continue, not only here, but everywhere. I sang songs but I’m standing here because our ancestors are here. We’ve got to defend them. We’ve got to protect them. And then, these little whirlwinds would come down the road, or go up the road towards the security camp where you were standing. And we knew our ancestors were there then because they showed themselves. And we were laughing. The big, old whirlwind made the security guards scatter. Our people must be upset about this because we still have that belief that our spirits are the whirlwinds that come around; They come to check on us. I’d give my life, like my grandpa did, like the old people did, to protect this place.

Dorece Sam:  When we came to find out that our family was massacred there, we were there because we wanted to protect the land.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Dorece is a direct descendant of Ox Sam: One of the only survivors of the 1865 massacre at Sentinel Rock near the mines’ waterline.

Dorece Sam:  Well, for somebody that’s connected to Mother Earth, they can feel things. Like me, myself; I can feel things out there. I was up in prayer at Sentinel Rock. I heard an old man sing, an old, old man. And I lay there and I tried to listen and listen to see if I could identify the song or hear any words in there that I could understand.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] She too is facing charges for protecting her homelands.

Dorece Sam:  At first, I got scared because I’ve never been to court like this before. But then, I kept on praying, kept on smudging. And now, I believe that they’re a waste of paper. A waste of aim and waste of paper. So I am like, I’m going to let Creator take care of it. I built a fire outside of my home and I threw all the paperwork, the TPO and the lawsuit, everything, I burned it in there, in the fire.

They’re doing it to try to hush us up because I know, in the TPO, they ask that we not post about them or anything on social media. They’re trying to silence us so we don’t say anything or go out there. And by doing that, they’re violating the Religious Freedom Act; by not allowing us to go up there.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Her children and grandchildren know about their mother’s work protecting Peehee Mu’huh.

Dorece Sam:  Like I always tell my kids, the best way I can describe to them – And my grandchildren – I said all the things that people are doing with mining and stuff like that, it makes Mother Earth heavy. And she’s hurting and she’s tired. And I was telling them that every time she goes to take a deep breath, that’s when the Earth shakes. The Earth moves. And she’s crying and she’s tired of all this mining.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Her own tribe, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone, signed a community benefits agreement with Lithium Americas in 2022. It’s the closest reservation to the mine site. It’s also the poorest in the region. Lithium Americas says the support for the project stems from the tribe’s desire to gain economic benefits.

Dorece Sam:  It’s hit with a slap lawsuit. And that’s the commitment that I made to protect this place. It’s in my heart, to protect that place. It means a lot to me.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] I attempted to reach the Fort McDermott Paiute Shoshone leadership for comment on several occasions but they didn’t call me back. Dorece says her community wasn’t fully consulted.

Dorece Sam:  They didn’t notify the people. They didn’t tell anybody what was going on. And so now we have our current chairman, his name is Arlo Crutcher. He’s totally for this mine. He is ignoring everybody and everything.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Lithium Americas declined an on-the-record interview but provided background information stating the Fort McDermott Tribe rejects the claim that there were massacres at Peehee Mu’huh. Get that. The company is trying to tell the natives what their own history is but other Fort McDermott elders know the stories of the massacres.

Myron Smart:  They came over to Santa Rosas and then they ended up out here where Thacker Pass is, and over there by, I think they call that the Centennial Peak. They happened to camp out there. When the soldiers finally came over the mountain late in the evening, they massacred the whole village there. They massacred women and children.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Even though the company denies the massacre happened at Peehee Mu’huh, the Bureau of Land Management holds records of it in its archives.

Michon Eben:  Why wasn’t the massacre mentioned in the historic properties treatment plan? Why weren’t these massacres mentioned in the record of the decision? Why wasn’t it mentioned in the Environmental Impact Statement? Why wasn’t it mentioned in the cultural resources inventory? We had to bring it up. The Surveyor? That was in the Bureau of Land Management’s own documents. They didn’t even have that in any of their documents. So, when they say well, we’ve proven in court… It’s junk science. They didn’t do their complete analysis and left this out. It’s a coverup. It’s been a coverup and they’re closing their eyes to it.

Lithium Nevada’s corporation attorney has implied that the tribes are lying about the sacredness of Peehee Mu’huh, calling these sacred sites “allegedly sacred areas of Thacker Pass.” This is not “allegedly.” This is not lying. Come on. How we’re treated less than, our dead are treated less than… That’s why nobody cares that there are unmarked burial grounds because it doesn’t say “historic cemetery.”

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony along with the Burns Paiute Tribe, were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, over lack of consultation on the mine project. After a judge ruled largely in favor of Lithium Americas in February, the tribe filed a new lawsuit along with Burns Paiute and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe.

Michon Eben:  You cannot dig 400 feet deep. You cannot destroy wetlands. You cannot destroy ecosystems. You can’t destroy the natural habitat of the sage grouse. You cannot do the destruction and take gallons and gallons of water in the driest region and tell us that that’s good for electric vehicles. Electric vehicles you still have to plug into the grid; That’s still part of fossil fuels.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The mine will burn around 11,300 gallons of diesel fuel a day for onsite operations and almost as much for offsite. Carbon emissions from the site would be more than 150,000 tons per year: Roughly 2.3 tons of carbon for every ton of lithium that’s produced. If reclamation is possible, it won’t be realized until, at least, 2162. There’s more. There are concerns over potential impacts on Indigenous women and girls with the arrival of Lithium Americas housing units for construction workers.

Michon Eben:  What’s really scary is part of the Environmental Impact Statement. If you are bringing in any type of man camp, and I’ll explain what a man camp is, but if you’re bringing in a man camp and you’re placing that near public land and you are disturbing the land, then you need to be doing a study for where that man camp is going. That didn’t happen in the Environmental Impact Statement. When you have to hire 1,000 men to build a lithium mine, you’re not going to hire 1,000 men locally; You have to bring in men from other places. Those men are usually young men. They bring in illegal activities and illegal drug activities. This is where the missing and murdered Indigenous people come in. The 30-40 miners that are out of there right now working, are coming into their local stores, asking them, where are all the pretty girls? Because they’re coming without their women.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] Recently, Michon’s own safety was in question.

Michon Eben:  Because I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t paying attention. So, I opened the door. I noticed a gentleman sitting over here because this is where our shuttle comes, and I heard a helicopter. Well, there are a lot of helicopters here because we have Careflight. The hospital’s right here. I’m used to helicopters. So, I hear a helicopter, I open the door. I open the door and I look and here comes a helicopter coming straight at me, right above the power poles.

Brandi Morin:  What?

Michon Eben:  Just above the power poles. And then it comes over here and it comes right here; Right above the power poles. Their door was already open but what they were doing is they’re hanging out. They’re so close, I could see them. The door was open and I could see somebody going, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, because I could see the flash of the light. And then, I realized, oh fuck, they’re taking my picture. I got scared, but that’s what it was. And then I got mad and I thought oh, little old me. Who am I? How come people got to take a picture of me? What gives anybody the right? And then, you think, okay. Well, I do know the President and the Department of Interior, they do want this mine because… You know.

Brandi Morin:  They think it’s the answer.

Michon Eben:  They think it’s the answer to combat fossil fuels. Even though, electric vehicles you’re still going to plug into the grid; That goes to fossil fuels.

Brandi Morin:  Michon says the worldview of lithium production is deceitful.

Michon Eben:  It’s not going to save the world. So, you’re seeing movie stars advertising electric vehicles. People are getting brainwashed about electric vehicles. You cannot mine your way out of a climate crisis. You can’t do that. You can’t destroy the Earth to save the Earth.

Brandi Morin:  If you could speak with Secretary Haaland about what’s happening in Peehee Mu’Huh, what would you say to her?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  I would tell her, to wake up. We need you. You’re a Native American. Your Mother Earth should mean something to you. Like I said, wake up and we need your help.

Brandi Morin:  What about the Biden administration?

BC Zahn-Nahtzu:  Us Native Americans have been here since time immemorial. It means it’s time for us to take our land back. Go dig somewhere else.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] I asked tribal members for permission to visit the sacred site at Sentinel Rock. Although security told us a few days before we couldn’t cross the road to access it, I did anyway. After all, they’re on unseated land. As I began to get closer to the rock where Paiute and Shoshone tried to run for their lives in 1865, my chest started heaving. The heartache here was overwhelming [end of voiceover].

I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Everything that they had to go through. You feel the pain that’s here.

[Voiceover] As temperatures soar across the West, putting one-third of Americans under excessive heat alerts, elders, like Dean, are not surprised. He says it’s only going to get worse. And extractive industries are accelerating the threat to all who live on Mother Earth.

Dean Barlese:  The property we have… Before this, there was a great flood. Then there was a wind, and then the ice and snow that destroyed the world destroyed the humans. The last one, we’re in that time already. And our old people say this world’s going to burn; It’ll burn up. White people, they continue to destroy. And we’ve gone beyond where we can come back. They don’t see it; They don’t see their children, their grandchildren, their great-great-grand… They don’t look ahead like we do. We look seven generations ahead and leave things the way they are for future generations. But they don’t see that.

Brandi Morin:  [Voiceover] The mine is expected to be up and running by 2026. Meanwhile, land and water defenders say they’ll continue to pray it can be stopped.

I’m Brandi Morin, reporting for The Real News, Ricochet Media, and IndigiNews in the unseated territories of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe Tribes in SoCal Nevada.

A recent petition demanding the Washington Commanders return to the ignominious ‘Redskins’ name has garnered thousands of signatures. The franchise changed its name after years of pressure from activists and tribal nations. The belated backlash to the name change must be viewed in light of the reactionary politics roiling the US.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Dave Zirin: And now for some choice words, 20,000 people. That’s the number that have signed a petition calling for the NFL’s Washington Commanders to change their name back to the dictionary defined racial slur that branded the franchise for decades: Redskins. This is a word I normally do not utter, but in this context, I think it is important to feel the weight of the violence of the word. A word which derives from the scalping of Native Americans by professional bounty hunters. Bounty hunters who are paid per red skin. Now I get why people want the old name back. It’s associated for many, not with racist violence, but with Super Bowls and the glory days. And yes, the name Commanders really, to use an academic term, sucks. It really sucks. It’s awful. It sounds like something conjured by a marketing exec who uses words like synergy. It doesn’t make you think of the city or of Gridiron Glory. The only image it conjures is Russell Crowe in a puffy shirt and a ponytail.

I also get that people associate the commander’s name change with the person who until last month held the title of the most disgusting franchise owner in sports, Dan Snyder. The odious Snyder dragged this team through 25 years of scandal, bigotry and football irrelevancy. So I understand why diehards, now that he has sold the team, want to turn the page. But before looking backwards for a new name, let’s be clear about the facts. The fact is that the repugnant Snyder was the champion of the old name and only changed it because of grassroots pressure led by Native American youth as well as a mighty push from team sponsors who demanded that it change following the police murder of George Floyd.

But now, like a horror movie villain rising from the dead, the name is straining to come back. And I’m not surprised at all. This is 2023, not 2020, and the politics of reaction are rampaging the landscape. Even this meager victory from the summer of 2020, the changing of a football team’s name is now as endangered as all those corporate diversity jobs so in Vogue three years ago. So you get state curriculum now that makes slavery sound like a trade school, you get Tony Morrison banned from libraries, and you get a howl to fight the woke mind virus by returning the racial slur back to its position of acceptance and prominence.

So before we slouch back into performative white supremacy, let’s remember a few things: Let’s remember that every tribal council in the United States from the Chippewa to the Cree had asked, to Snyder’s deaf ears, that the team name change. Let us remember that the name only exists because the first owner of the team was a stone-cold racist named George Preston Marshall, who was an arch segregationist that made sure the team was the last in the NFL to integrate. Marshall, who was elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame had a deep affection for the Slave South and minstrel shows. And for years, he had Dixie played before home games. In fact, the iconic fight for old D.C. Washington football fight song under Marshall’s watchful eye used to go not fight for old D.C., but fight for old Dixie.

Let us remember, it’s a racist name coined by a racist man, and it belongs nowhere but the dust bin of history. So to everyone celebrating the end of Daniel Snyder, I am with you! To everyone who wants the name to not be the Commanders, I am with you! But to everyone who in a fit of joy over Snyder’s departure wants to go back to the old name, I just have to say, stop it. This team has a championship past and the name is a jagged scar on that history. No other team would call themselves a racial slur, and it is the mass extermination of the lives of indigenous peoples that created the preconditions for such a vile brand. So to put it simply, if your team needed a genocide to come up with its name, then it’s probably time to get a new name.

This story originally appeared in The Breach on Aug 24, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

Patrick Michell has had his trailer packed and ready to go all week.

If he and his family have to flee the path of encroaching wildfires in British Columbia, it will be the second time in three years.

“Here’s where I’m at today,” Michell wrote to The Breach on Monday, attaching a photo of his utility trailer under a smoke-filled sky. 

His family has owned the trailer since a record-breaking wildfire in 2021 burned their house down, along with the entire town of Lytton, B.C. 

The day of the fire, Michell realized he wasn’t a mere evacuee. 

“I was a refugee because I did not have a home to go back to,” the former chief of the Nlaka’pamux community Kanaka Bar said in an interview. “I want people to understand there’s a difference.”

Nothing in Lytton has yet been rebuilt. That includes the house Michell and his wife Tina lived in, which had a solar panel on its roof and toys in the yard for their grandchildren.

The day that he spoke to The Breach, he could point to smoke rising from wildfires in three different directions.

Researchers have found that the Lytton fire and heat dome would’ve been virtually impossible without fossil-fuel-charged climate change, which disrupted an east-to-west jet stream and dried out the soil.

Now, across western Canada, the same Indigenous communities that gave early warnings against burning fossil fuels are among the first to be permanently displaced by climate change—or face a real risk of it. But leaders like Michell are also leading a charge for solutions, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions, building more resilient communities and transitioning First Nations to clean energy sources.

“We’re no longer planning for extreme weather events,” he said. “We’re living it.”

‘How many more hits can we take?’

Two years after the fire, Michell and his wife still don’t have a permanent place to call home. 

They’ve skipped from a hotel in Abbotsford to trailer parks in Chilliwack and Boston Bar to an abandoned mill site where there was no water or septic system. 

Even those who didn’t lose their homes in Lytton came back to find no amenities, he said. Some moved back without water, sewage or electricity and didn’t have their power restored for two years.

A nearby First Nation cleared land and put in water and septic for 20 RVs, so Michell and his wife moved there. 

“Just in time, an atmospheric river hit and wiped out roads,” he said. One month after that, temperatures reached record lows. The water line and septic system they’d set up for their trailer on Lytton First Nation froze. 

“I have a picture of myself at 4:30 in the morning, putting heat trays on my septic line on the camper trailer I was in,” he said. “It was the first time I cried. I was overwhelmed. How many more hits can we take? Fires. Floods. Cold. How many more?”

Then, Michell’s wife Tina became seriously ill and was hospitalized for three months. Lytton First Nation gave the couple a temporary home. That’s where they were this week, waiting to see if another wildfire would threaten their home yet again.

Michell still mourns for the 18 bookcases worth of books that he lost in the Lytton fire. 

He describes the impact that fires, flooding and extreme cold have had on his family and neighbours as a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

“Every time there’s the smell of smoke in the air, you see anxiety levels shoot through the roof.”

More than 10,000 First Nations people have been displaced long term

Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by wildfire evacuations and thousands of these evacuees have been displaced for the long term, like Michell and his family.

Indigenous peoples make up five per cent of Canada’s population but experience 42 per cent of wildfire evacuation events, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

This year, 25,000 people from 79 First Nations have had to leave home because of wildfires, Indigenous Services Canada told The Breach by email.

In the past decade, 70,824 First Nations people have been evacuated from their communities because of wildfires, the department’s data shows. Another 30,411 people have been evacuated because of floods. More than 11,400 of these evacuees were displaced for longer than three months.

Downstream of the oil sands: wildfires, toxic spills, cancer

More than 1,500 kilometres away from where Michell is living, residents of another First Nation fear their community could become unlivable. And wildfires are only one factor. 

The people of Fort Chipewyan, Alta., known as Fort Chip, are all too familiar with the environmental and health effects of the oil industry. Downstream of the oil sands, the community has been speaking out about its members dying of rare cancers at disproportionate rates for years. 

“My uncle Tony brought it up in 1990,” Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation member Mike Mercredi told The Breach. “He died from rare bile duct cancer in 2006.”

The community is also dealing with Imperial Oil’s tailings pond leak. More than 5 million litres of the oil giant’s wastewater—containing arsenic, dissolved iron and sulphates—seeped into the ground. Residents are terrified that their water and food have been poisoned. “A lot of people are actually scared to live here now,” Archie Cardinal told Imperial executives at a town hall in March. 

Then, on May 30, Fort Chip was evacuated as a 8,600-hectare wildfire burned out of control. 

The K’ai Tailé Déne community didn’t end up burning down. But the three-week evacuation took a heavy toll, Mercredi said.

At least one elder passed away during the evacuation, losing the chance to ever return home. Others experienced exacerbated mental health and addiction issues because of the stress, Mercredi said. 

‘The land is poisoned’

Just as hotter, drier summers are bringing wildfires, increasingly warm winters are also bringing their own threats.

This year, the ice road that connects Fort Chip to Fort McMurray didn’t open until January, Mercredi said. It normally opens in early December. 

He said he fears the day that the road is completely unusable because Fort Chip relies on diesel generators for heat and power. Without diesel deliveries, “We’re basically going back 30 years or 40 years and getting woodstoves,” he said. 

That’s one of the reasons Mercredi is currently studying for a Master of Sustainability in Energy Security at the University of Saskatchewan—so that he can help his community get off diesel.

“If it fails, we may have to evacuate the whole entire community and be climate refugees,” he said. “Won’t be able to drink the water…And we can’t live off the land anymore because the land is poisoned.”

Years before the 2023 wildfire season, before Canadian forest fires caused dangerously terrible air quality for Torontonians and Montrealers and grabbed the attention of European environmental agencies and the New York Post, Mercredi says he warned that Canada’s oil sands would impact the whole world.

After his uncle died and he noticed other people getting sick, he quit his job operating a heavy hauler at Syncrude and started speaking out about the impacts of colonialism and the oil industry.

“When the stone hits the tailings pond and ripples out…I said that ripple is going to affect the whole entire world,” he said. 

“The ripple effect now is everyone’s seeing the smoke. Everyone’s feeling wildfires—not just us in the north, not just us living in the bush, in the sticks. 

“Now people in the cities, all the way to the U.S. are saying: ‘What the hell is going on?’”

Hunting cabins and fishing boats—gone

In Ontario, too, First Nations are losing food sources and reliable transportation routes due to the effects of climate change—and it didn’t just start this year. 

“When you hear about the hazard of the air quality in southern Ontario, that’s what we face on an annual basis in the north,” said Sol Mamakwa, NDP MPP for Kiiwetinoong, the only Ontario riding with a majority Indigenous population. “The whole north is just covered in smoke.”

At times, the smoke makes it impossible for planes to take off or land.

“These gravel runways, also known as airports, they’re lifelines to these First Nations,” Mamakwa told The Breach. “Lifelines to health care, to food security, to education. Fuel as well—because not everybody is connected to the grid.”

He said he visited the Oji-Cree community of Kasabonika this summer, where a wildfire was raging nearby. Community leaders told him the fire was getting close to one of their camps used for harvesting food.

“Sure enough, a couple days later…they go visit the site and the camp is no more. All their canoes, boats, they’ve been burned.”

These communities already struggle with food security, Mamakwa said, and wildfires only make the situation worse.

He said the governments of Canada and Ontario need to act with way more urgency. They also need to transfer firefighting resources to First Nations, who have their own firefighting crews. 

“These are our traditional territories, we should be given the resources to be able to fight our own fires.”

Lands have been drying since 1990s

His Nlaka’pamux people, Michell said, first started noticing the effects of climate change as far back as 1990. 

Michell says these events are the culmination of hundreds of years of history. He traces the increased risk of wildfires to the 19th century, when the colonial system of private property was introduced to British Columbia. 

“For thousands of years, my ancestors actually did proactive forest fire hazard reduction by pruning, cutting, burning,” he said. “[But] when you own property, it becomes private property. That means, ‘Indigenous people: stay the heck out.’”

It became impossible for the Nlaka’pamux to manage forest fire risks on lands owned by settlers and the government, including lands around highways and railways. Michell remembers trespassing as a young man just to fish on his traditional territory. 

For decades, he said, the lands have become forest fire hazards as trees died and dry brush accumulated. 

Then, there are the changes to weather caused by burning fossil fuels, which Michell says his community has observed for more than 30 years.

“We started walking the land and we started seeing the ecosystems were much drier than our collective conscious knowledge was aware,” he said. “We saw traditional food sources like the Huckleberry and the Saskatoon and the mushrooms, no longer growing where they used to grow.”

“So now we have this combined heat and drought, with weird wind, coupled with this forest fire hazard accumulations. Then it happens: a spark.”

Billions spent on pipeline could’ve been spent on adaptation

As chief in the late 2010s, Michell spoke up against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the increase in fossil fuel emissions that it will cause. 

Now that he’s retired—and when he’s not living under the threat of evacuation—Michell continues to call for change. 

Canada has poured $30 billion into a pipeline and only $10 billion into climate adaptation, he pointed out. 

He wants to see the resources—people, time, money and technology—that Canada spends on fossil fuel development diverted to climate mitigation and adaptation.

“With only six years left to make the substantial investments in transition and adaptation, we don’t have time for tea and cucumber sandwiches. We need to start making decisions and getting shit done.”

This story was produced by Ricochet Media and IndigiNews, and is being co-published by The Real News.

Not long past the break of dawn, along a remote road deep in the unceded, forested mountains of southern Vancouver Island, the steady blaring of a conch shell sends a warning through the trees. 

A raid is coming. 

In the Savage Patch camp, a new front in a years-long struggle over the fate of some of the country’s oldest trees, a small group of forest defenders scurry to pack sleeping bags and douse the fire that kept them warm through the night. 

Uncle Rico, a Cree land defender, streaks her face with red warpaint. A young, broad-shouldered settler land defender, known as Sandstorm, beats a drum gifted to him by a Native ally. He sings an ancestral Viking warrior song, the reverb of his voice echoing through the quiet of the woodland morning. In this camp, everyone goes by a pseudonym.

Uncle Rico begins to sing the Women’s Warrior Song as the group forms a circle and joins the call to battle. 

This fight is for the ancient forest of the Fairy Creek Watershed, which is being systematically cut down by the largest privately-owned logging company in the province.

For over three years, settler activists and Indigenous land defenders have fought to save some of the last and largest old growth trees on the planet. Thousands of forest defenders once occupied the 1,189-hectare watershed, spread across isolated camps and blockades where they chained themselves to hard blocks, set up tree sits and perched under handmade tripods dozens of feet in the air. 

Their desperate attempts to stop the harvesting of majestic red and yellow cedars, trees up to 2,000 years old, have been met with force by both the RCMP and the Teal-Jones Group. 

Teal-Jones owns the rights to Tree Farm License 46 in the Fairy Creek Watershed, which it purchased 20 years ago. Those rights allow the company to cut stands of old growth that have not been specifically protected by the provincial government. The company produces shingles and shake from the coveted cedar wood. 

These cedars are some of the oldest in the world, and their habitat is the last unprotected, relatively intact watershed on southwest Vancouver Island. Little wonder then that it has drawn so many passionate defenders. 

The problem is that Teal-Jones stands to make an estimated $20 million in profits from logging 200 hectares (494 acres) of old-growth trees in the licence area, and the elected chief and council for the local First Nation would lose out on a significant source of revenue if old growth logging were to come to an end. 

Land Defenders have said the forest is endangered and should be left intact, as logging threatens the fragile watershed. In April of 2021, Teal-Jones was granted a court injunction against persons unknown blocking access to their logging sites. The RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) has spent two years and $20 million arresting protesters en masse for defying the court order. 

Those protests have been called the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, with almost 1,200 arrests being made over a roughly eight-month period. Almost all of the charges were eventually withdrawn or dismissed, with 146 cases dismissed earlier this month over RCMP errors. 

“This is going to be that time that changes the entire future,” says Uncle Rico, moments before an RCMP raid that will end with three arrests, including her own. 

“We’re no longer asking for (our) rights, we’re telling them what those rights are.

“You have a thousand ancestors standing behind you,” she tells her campmates. “Your own, and my own.

I make sure I call them everywhere I go. As Crees, we ride together. I’ll lead you on. All the brave to the front. Today is a good day to die.”

Uncle Rico stops to chuckle and wink, “but you don’t have to die.”

RCMP operating with impunity 

C-IRG was formed in 2017, reportedly following the massive anti-pipeline resistance led by the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota, and amid concerns similar uprisings could occur around resource extraction projects in Canada. 

As the name suggests, the unit is responsible for managing conflicts between industry and communities. Unfortunately for those (overwhelmingly Indigenous) communities, conflicts have more often been managed by militarized commando raids than good faith negotiation. 

The unit exists to flatten opposition to natural resource projects, and has sought to do so, with mixed results, in places like Wet’suwet’en territory and Fairy Creek. 

Wherever Indigenous Peoples are halting the flow of profits, the C-IRG will show up, lock down the area, exclude journalists and then arrest everyone — far from the prying eyes of the public. 

Earlier this year, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, the RCMP’s civilian oversight body, announced they would be launching an investigation into systemic misconduct by C-IRG. Almost 500 formal complaints over violence and violations of Charter and Indigenous rights have been reported to the CRCC. Allegations include excessive force, harassment, illegal tactics, unprofessional behaviour, racism and discrimination. 

Many of those complaints stem from the force’s actions at Fairy Creek. 

C-IRG’s presence at Fairy Creek has been minimal since June of 2021, when the province issued a deferral of some old-growth logging permits at the request of the Pacheedaht First Nation, whose traditional territories encompass the watershed. However, in late July of this year, Indigenous forest defenders set up a new blockade, naming it the Savage Patch, on Trunk Road 11, leading to a stand of old growth near Edinburgh Mountain. It’s above Eden Grove, a sanctuary of temperate rainforest, where some trees measure ten feet thick. Despite the deferral, the group had said the Fairy Creek Watershed was still being logged. 

They constructed a giant effigy of a native, endangered screech owl, built from recovered wood, on a bridge leading to the old growth. 

‘Stand in strength together’

Pacing, Uncle Rico tells the forest defenders to hold their ground. C-IRG is on its way. 

She’s wearing camo pants, a black t-shirt printed with white text reading ‘STOP PIPELINES, SAVE FORESTS’ and a green vest. Her thick, long brown hair is tucked behind a black bandana. 

“They’re (RCMP) gonna test you, they’re gonna try to get into your head, they’re gonna try to get into your knees and make them shake. And you’re just gonna sit here, and you’re gonna know in your heart that what you’re doing is right.” 

She beats her drum and continues, “They want you to be violent… But it’s our job to keep everybody safe. So, remember when your feet feel like running, that the group is standing. Stand in strength together.”

She tells them not to be afraid, but even if they are, to know they’re helping to save future generations. 

“It’s always when you tremble the most that you’re making the biggest change in the world. Whether it’s your voice, your knees, your soul. And right now, we’re making a huge change for the next seven (generations). We’re making it so our babies won’t cry themselves to sleep.”

In unison, they sing a warrior song and raise their fists to the sky. 

From the north side of the roadway, we hear the gravel rumble under truck wheels. A fog of dust fills the air before parting to reveal a convoy of at least 13 RCMP and C-IRG cars, trucks and paddy wagons.

They pull up along the road in front of the blockaders. 

A sacred fire surrounded with stones smoulders quietly in front of the land defenders as traditional medicines of sage and sweetgrass burn on top of a piece of red fabric. 

Dozens of RCMP officers line up in front of the entrance to Trunk Road 11, just meters from the resistance group, who continue to sing and drum. 

We’re the only journalists present, the only observers as the two sides prepare to square off on a remote road in the shadow of giant trees. It’s important to be there to document this, the first raid in over two years. 

During the arrest of Uncle Rico, an RCMP sergeant grabs me and threatens me with arrest when I refuse to follow their media exclusion zones. I remind him that the RCMP have been ordered by the courts to respect media rights. In 2021, a coalition of media outlets, including Ricochet, took the RCMP to court over access restrictions at Fairy Creek, and won. 

A lone young woman from the Pacheedaht First Nation noses her pickup truck past the yellow line of police tape and throttles it, disappearing behind a cloud of dust. Known as Wee-One, she is helping lead the protection of her territories. But it’s risky for her to stay. She’s been arrested and charged with obstruction at previous blockades, more than once.

During one of her arrests in October of 2021, this journalist witnessed the RCMP use chainsaws to cut logs piled over her vehicle in a makeshift barrier. She and an Anishinaabe land defender known as gaagaagi were barricaded inside. The RCMP smashed the windows of the car and dragged them out. The two were attached at the arms to a hard lock inside a PVC pipe. Both were held down by multiple officers as they began cutting the pipe with a small hand saw. 

Wee-One screamed out in pain multiple times. Then she passed out. An officer who identified himself as a medic assured onlookers that Wee-One was “fine.” Other forest defenders shouted in horror as they watched from behind another barricade. Her limp and motionless body was then turned over and handcuffed. The RCMP carried her to the paddy wagon and shut the door. 

She doesn’t want to be caught in their hands again. 

For Pacheedaht, it’s complicated

Wee-One’s presence in the fight to save her territories is complicated. As a member of the Pacheedaht Nation, her elected Chief and Council have a partnership with Teal-Jones and the forestry industry. In fact, the Pacheedaht manage or co-manage a forest area with 140,000 cubic meters of annual cut, run a sawmill and log-sorting plant and have more forestry projects in the works. 

“We’ve been pushed out of the forestry industry for hundreds of years,” Pacheedaht Chief Jeff Jones told the Narwhal in 2021. “And now we’re at a point where we’re actually benefiting from forestry resources in the territory.” 

The nation, made up of approximately 300 members with around 120 living on reserve, created a cedar conservation strategy in 2005 to identify areas to protect. It takes 400 years for cedar to grow to the appropriate size for traditional activities like canoe-making. 

Ricochet reached out to Teal-Jones to request an interview. They declined.

We also reached out to Pacheedaht First Nation leadership but did not receive a response by press time.  

Even though the Pacheedaht elected leadership supports Teal-Jones logging activities and in the past has asked forest defenders to pack up and leave, Wee-One doesn’t accept the colonial band government’s decision to allow it. 

There is also a dispute over who the legitimate Pacheedaht traditional hereditary chief is. The elected leadership recognizes Frank Jones as the hereditary leader, and Frank has given the green light to logging. However, Pacheedaht elder Bill Jones, 82, who is against logging old growth, disputes Frank’s legitimacy as the rightful hereditary leader. 

Elder Bill says Frank, who was adopted into the Pacheedaht and grew up with Chief Jeff Jones, has created an allyship of sorts with the chief that serves the two well when making deals with industry. 

He attributes his community’s disconnection from their culture and spirituality to residential schools and other acts of colonial violence. He says he’s tired of mourning everything that has been lost and does not want the last of his peoples’ lands to be pillaged.

The true hereditary chief, says Bill, is 20-year-old Victor Peters. 

“Jasper Peters was the true hereditary chief, and his son Harry followed him, and his son Michael and then Victor, Michael’s son,” explained Bill from his long-term care home in Sooke, British Columbia. 

Victor publicly claimed hereditary leadership in a YouTube video posted in March, 2021. 

“I want to keep them (the trees) standing,” he said in the video. “I think I’d probably feel like I’d lost a loved one… I’d feel sad… and kind of more depressed if that happened.”

But Bill claims Victor and his family have been subject to political bullying from Pacheedaht elected leadership, which has led to Victor pulling back from, rather than stepping into, his hereditary role. 

‘They want the truth to be hidden’

Bill is a survivor of the Alberni Indian Residential School, where he endured beatings alongside mental, spiritual, and sexual abuse. He went on to work in the logging industry and lived on the reserve up until six months ago when health complications required him to move to an assisted living facility. He’s been an unwavering voice of opposition to the old-growth logging industry for years and fully supports land defenders protecting what’s left of his territories. 

He says the Pacheedaht chief and council are operating under oppressive systems of colonial law designed to assimilate Indigenous tribes, using economic incentives to force them into doing the bidding of colonial governments and industry. Chief Jeff Jones, who is Bill’s second cousin, and his leadership team, says Bill, “are pawns to industry and the provincial government.”

“In other words, it’s coercion. You know, the Truth and Reconciliation Act, the oppressors are living in a world of ‘let’s pretend.’ And they want the truth to be (hidden from) those that they oppress. Our (Pacheedaht) government operates much the same as the federal and provincial governments. They operate in secrecy. They don’t inform people, and they don’t account to people.”

The colonial agenda to divide, conquer, and consume has infiltrated the hearts and minds of greater society, he goes on to say. And many are too overcome with oppression and fear of economic uncertainty to realize the harm being done to themselves, others and Mother Nature. 

“There’s a basic structural part of the oppressive system — they do not want people everywhere in this world to recognize themselves… They do not want to have, in particular, First Nations people become aware that they have to be sensitive to their surroundings, so that they can know what to do in their lives, and to keep their life going in this part of the world.”

Wearing blue jeans held up by suspenders, and a t-shirt depicting a tall tree standing alone in a forest bed, Elder Bill’s long, thin white hair is tied back in a ponytail. His brown eyes, outlined with rings of blue, are amplified through his prescription glasses as he gestures with weathered hands.

He’s in full support of forest defenders and happily welcomes them to his traditional territory. 

“And that’s where we come in, you know, our hopes and dreams are in our hearts, and our souls, our values are given to us by our Great Mother, and that is always reborn in our children. Now we have to continue our fight, and yes, I do approve of anyone going up to the forest to protect it.”

He’s especially proud of Wee-One, from his own nation, for putting herself on the line to save their ancestral home. 

“She’s a valiant and courageous young woman who actually wants to live by the truth. She is a warrior looking after our Great Mother’s great gift to us.”

But he’s familiar with the C-IRG unit and their many, often notorious, raids on the forest defenders. He knows they will be coming for those on the frontlines of the new blockade.

“They invent brutal, oppressive tactics at the spur of the moment. It’s simple as that, you know, there’s nothing nice about it. It’s a brutal attack on our sovereignty… and personal integrity. They don’t look upon First Nations as persons. They look upon us as criminals, or as what the government once called us, ‘agitators’ and you know, ‘troublemakers’ and ‘shit disturbers.’”

“The RCMP have been given that authority to treat us like that.”

Elder Bill has tasked Tla’amin Nation Elder Rose Henry, affectionately called Grandma Losah by land defenders, to lead their fight to save the forest on the territory. She is a fiery, unyielding mover and shaker who has been involved in social justice initiatives since she was a teenager. 

She regularly visits land defenders to provide pep talks and advise on cultural protocols. 

“My message for the people from other countries is that behind every beautiful scene, there’s always a dark side,” she says while sitting in Eden Grove, an unprotected, old-growth forest within the Fairy Creek watershed. 

​​Listening carefully, we notice the sounds of the forest come alive. Hidden beneath the woodland floor, the constant thrumming and buzzing of wasp colonies fill the air. Rays of light break through the canopy, scattering across the trunks of towering trees coated with soft moss. As the birds sing us their songs overhead, Grandma Losah sits on a bench, drum in hand, and continues.

She shares how when visitors come to appreciate and enjoy what makes the surrounding landscape beautiful, we often don’t see the extractive nature behind some of these industries harvesting natural resources. While the industries disturb these “perfect spots because they see the beauty,” they contribute to reducing biodiversity, disrupting ecosystems and releasing stored carbon from the soil, which is a key player in helping mitigate the harsh effects of climate change. 

“Our brothers, the trees are few and far between. When you look around here, you see our most sacred medicine, the cedar,” she continues. 

Her hand-woven traditional cedar hat covers her greying long hair that falls at her shoulders as she continues to keep the beat of her drum. 

“So, when I sing some of the songs… I’m letting the spirits of our brothers know that we’re here, we hear you, and we love you.”  

She begins speaking of the prophecy of the Eighth Fire, which speaks of a fork in the road that divides into two directions. One direction speaks of materialism and destruction, and the other leads to a period of harmony where “the destruction of the past will be healed.” 

“The Eighth Fire is saying it’s time. Wake up, people. It’s time for us to come together and act as one. We are all one.”

She breaks out into the Women’s Warrior Song, and the beat of her drum reverberates through the dense, untamed oasis of the grove surrounding her. 

‘Even the animals are upset’

The day before the C-IRG raid on the blockade, several land defenders bathe naked in the Gordon River nearby. It’s a clear and gentle flowing refuge where they go to cleanse, read, sing and pray. Afterward, they take a break from the scorching 39-degree heat beneath the forest’s canopy, napping on the moss-covered earth. 

Getting a deep, full night’s sleep here is rare. They’re always on high alert for potential enforcement from RCMP and prepared to face the wrath of angry industry workers who want to run them out. Land defenders take turns keeping watch to guard the barricade they’ve constructed. 

This barrier, adorned with hand-printed signs of resistance and red dresses, represents and honours the Indigenous women and girls who were murdered or have disappeared across the country, victims of “Canada’s” genocide. 

Beneath a tarp, they’ve created a makeshift kitchen using a propane cooking stove. A cook named Dragonfly, a woman in her 50s who has been arrested more than once at previous Fairy Creek demonstrations, is creating a communal meal of donated vegetables, pasta and canned tomatoes. 

Later, they share stories and jokes before switching the tone to something more serious, the topic of what’s to come. “Even the animals are upset by what’s happening,”  Uncle Rico says. 

They’ve heard frightening sounds from the bushes on more than one occasion as a mother bear on the other side of the Gordon bridge asserts her territory and, to the land defenders’ ears, expresses her anger over the ravaging of her home by these loggers. 

But Uncle Rico encourages them never to bow to fear and reminds them of why they’re there.

“This is a worldwide problem… The government doesn’t want [blockades] because that stops money. But with the amount of old growth that were losing worldwide, things will never be the same. Everything is so connected.”

“Taking away these ecosystems, taking away our ancestors. It’s definitely not going to fix anything.”

Now, as C-IRG is closing in, the officers play a pre-recorded reading of the injunction over an echoing speaker. The land defenders, led by Uncle Rico, continue to drum and sing the Women’s Warrior Song. The police move in, wielding yellow tape, demanding the land defenders move back or face arrest. 

‘No matter what we do, you’re going to brutalize us!’

The front line slowly shifts as the land defenders are walked all the way back to a wooden gate they now lock from the inside with a chain and padlock. A C-IRG officer tells them to get behind the barricade, or they will be arrested. 

“But we can’t!” yells Uncle Rico. “Don’t you see? You either want us to move out of the way, or you want us behind the gate, but right now, you’re giving us instructions that no matter what we do, you’re going to brutalize us.”

An RCMP helicopter that has been circling nearby eventually lands in a cut block where old growth cedars were logged just three years earlier. Drones dart about overhead, buzzing back and forth over the clearing as a sea of blue-uniformed police swarm the road. 

“We’re not going to brutalize you,” the officer responds. “Get on the other side of the gate, or you’ll be arrested for obstruction.” 

“But I don’t want you blocking us in so you can brutalize us…” pleads Uncle Rico. 

RCMP officers approach Uncle Rico, who is now sheltering behind Sandstorm. The two continue to beat their drums as they are separated by the RCMP, and Sandstorm is dragged away. 

As Uncle Rico screams at the officers not to touch her drum, that it is a sacred object, a First Nations C-IRG Liaison Officer named Ben Smith steps in, directing the two officers holding Uncle Rico at each arm to stop. He asks if someone can take her drum. 

“No, this has spiritual significance, and I can’t just give it to anyone,” she yells back. 

The two had an exchange the day before when he arrived at the camp with two other liaison officers, one of them also Indigenous. She told him colonial law had no relevance there.

She tells Smith what he’s doing is wrong. 

“What happened, Neech? You just don’t respect our own laws. Your ancestors see you; you know how sick you are in your heart.”

He steps slightly away and says nothing. The other officers holding her attempt to drag her forward. 

Smith steps in again.  

“Ok, she’s going to resist, so stop.” 

He says his job is to avoid escalation in these often-traumatic experiences and to be a liaison with Indigenous peoples as they’re being arrested. He notes that his job is hard, dealing with the legacy of colonial violence against his own people. But he believes what he is doing is good. 

Uncle Rico is laid on the ground, and officers attempt to place a drag bag underneath her to pull her to their paddy wagon. She kicks it off, and four officers grab her by each limb and carry her toward the waiting vehicle. Meanwhile, an excavator is clearing some rocks and logs from the road.

When the land defenders are cleared away and one other woman is arrested, the excavator roars in, and demolishes the wooden barricade in minutes. The sounds of the machine rumble through the forest. 

The remaining land defenders who haven’t been arrested are silent. 

They follow police to the Gordon River bridge and discover the screech owl effigy has been torn apart by officers dressed in military fatigues that hiked in through a back path. The remnants of the structure were thrown into the river below. 

After being taken to Lake Cowichan, a town about an hour drive from the former Savage Patch camp, the three land defenders are released without charges. Uncle Rico says it’s the first time she has ever been arrested. 

Wee-One, her companion gaagaagi, and other land defenders embrace their comrades and smoke cigarettes outside the RCMP station. Uncle Rico gives the middle finger to an officer driving out of the parking lot.

With a smile on her face,  she says this fight is far from over. 

“This is just the start of the next seven generations. We are nothing but a prayer standing here until the next prayers step up and take our place. This is forever. We’re never going away. And even when Savage Patch is old, and we become the ground, our children will be Savage Patch. Savage Patch will never die. They can’t break us.”

This story originally appeared in NACLA on Aug. 2, 2023. It is reprinted here with permission.

In Araçuaí, a small city in southeastern Brazil an eight-hour drive from the nearest international airport, restauranteur Maria Aparecida Alves de Aguilar never imagined she would be printing English menus. Business has been unrecognizably active in recent months at Churrascaria e Restaurante 367. Work crews “call in lunches twenty at a time” and arrive in the evening for after-work beers.

Araçuaí is a small city in Jequitinhonha Valley, one of Brazil’s most impoverished regions. With 35,000 residents, it is one of the larger cities in a rural region that holds close to 750,000 people. Water is scarce, but over half of the valley’s residents are involved in some form of agriculture, many in subsistence farming. Jequitinhonha Valley has a long history of hunger, earning it the unfortunate nickname of “the Valley of Misery.”

Recently, however, the region has received a new name in political speeches and corporate communiques around the world: “Lithium Valley.”

The global energy transition is set to require a staggering increase in the lithium supply. An essential element in EV batteries, demand could increase as much as 42 times over two decades according to International Energy Agency projections. Jequitinhonha Valley sits on 85 percent of Brazil’s known lithium deposits, which has sparked a race to invest and develop. In May, Minas Gerais governor Romeu Zema and Brazilian federal officials traveled to Nasdaq in New York to launch the “Lithium Valley” project, looking for international investors for the lithium mining companies operating in the region.

The Valley of Opportunity?

In promoting this investment, officials are making the case that lithium mining will remake the long-neglected region into a “valley of opportunity.” Central to that campaign is Sigma Lithium, which began production in April, the first of the new mining companies in the region to do so. Sigma promises to produce a “green” lithium using renewable energy and 90 percent recycled water, to hire local, and to voluntarily invest more than the country requires in local municipalities and environmental projects.

Sigma expects its Grota do Cirilo mining site to be in production for 13 years, generating over $5 billion for the company and over $200 million in payments to local municipalities. This year, the company expects to pay around $10.7 million to Araçuaí and its neighboring town Itinga, just under a tenth of the two municipalities’ combined GDP according to data from Brazil’s 2022 census. Sigma has also instituted programs to construct wells for rural communities, create lines of microcredit for local women entrepreneurs, and pay for the preservation of local forest land.

Even so, as the region appears to be undergoing a transformative lithium boom, there is growing concern about the costs for rural communities that are most vulnerable to the environmental impacts of mining, and about whether local governments can translate the presence of international mining businesses into lasting gains for the region’s residents. The Movement for People Affected by Dams (MAB) has been campaigning against the advance of lithium mining, citing inevitable environmental degradation, water-intensive practices, and the opposition of federally protected quilombo communities—settlements generally founded by escaped slaves.

Exporting Brazilian Lithium

As critical metals become a key tool in global strategic and economic negotiations, Brazil is hoping to raise its profile as a major producer of lithium. According to Elaine Santos, who researches critical minerals at the University of Sao Paulo, the Lula administration’s policy toward lithium has been “largely one of continuity with the previous [Bolsonaro] administration, of liberalizing exports.” In 2022, former president Bolsonaro’s administration repealed a decades-old policy that restricted lithium exports. This year, Lula’s Ministry of Mines has partnered with the state government of Minas Gerais in promoting “Lithium Valley” to international investors.

Minas Gerais is also pursuing a policy of privatization and seeking international investment in lithium production. Last year, governor Romeu Zema sold the state’s 33 percent share in CBL, a lithium mining company operating in the state for decades. And this year, a bill is moving through the state assembly that would create a regional “Lithium Hub” that would permit the executive branch to create a special tax regime for lithium mining companies in the area.

Plans for Regional Development

Today in Araçuaí, new construction is the norm across the city. Maria says the change—visible from the patio of her restaurant—is striking. The neighboring hotel, which is “always full,” recently constructed a new building, doubling its capacity. A carwash and repair shop is being set up in the abandoned lot next door, and the gas station is now open 24 hours. “We are seeing our population investing, looking to improve,” she says. “This is good.”

In mid-June, the Minas Gerais Mayors’ Association (FMP) held its first public “Lithium Seminar,” bringing together national and state officials, business leaders, and local community organizers. Araçuaí mayor Tadeu Barbossa, from the Social Democratic Party, says he believes the city “has not experienced a moment as favorable as this.” Barbossa says that for lithium mining companies today, “there is now a market obligation, not a legal obligation, to arrive in a way that attends to social necessities, or to environmental issues.”

State deputy Jean Freire, from Lula’s Workers’ Party, echoed many of his colleagues on stage in recognizing an opportunity, but expressed concern about trusting businesses to mitigate impacts on vulnerable communities and ensure the region is adequately compensated. Freire says that the valley has a long history of extractive industries, from diamond mining to eucalyptus plantations and recent dam construction, and that each declared “now progress is coming.”

“And we have the history of mining as a guide,” he says, pointing to trends that connect mining to increased violence, skyrocketing rents for local residents and students, and environmental damage. Still, he notes, “We have to keep in mind that this is the least developed region in Minas Gerais, and one of the least developed in Brazil. “We have an immense wealth, economically speaking, under our feet. What can we do to keep this wealth for our population?”

Part of the answer, for Freire and many other state and national officials on stage, is a policy aimed at developing lithium processing capacity in the region, and eventually, even manufacturing batteries in the area.

However, concrete steps toward this type of strategy are unclear. In the state legislature, Freire’s “Lithium Hub” bill was stripped of language that would require lithium processing to occur in Jequitinhonha Valley. Nationally, Elaine Santos says, this type of strategy would be possible but would take years. Santos believes that the current lack of regulations for lithium exports will make it more difficult to create a competitive lithium processing and battery manufacturing chain in Brazil, and easier to end up exporting raw materials.

Water Scarcity in Rural Communities

Local conflict over lithium primarily involves access to water, a resource that is scarce in the Jequitinhonha Valley. The activist group MAB, which has been organizing in the region since 1990, contends that “the struggle for access to water is the most important agenda in this semiarid region.” Though Sigma uses a state-of-the-art water recycling system, MAB points out that it still has a permit to use 3.8 million liters of water per day; in their calculations, enough to serve 34,000 families.

In some cases, local communities are directly competing with mining businesses for water and losing access to stable water supplies. On June 15, when the water truck arrived in Cinta Vermelha, an Indigenous village outside of Araçuaí, the driver told resident Cleonice Pankararu that the company would be making only one delivery the following week. The 10 families that make up Cinta Vermelha, like many communities in the area, rely on water deliveries during the dry season and receive a stipend from the federal Indigenous health agency to pay the local water company. But in recent months, Cleonice Pankararu (Pankararu is the name of her tribe) was told by representatives of the company that deliveries would be more infrequent and that in July, prices would rise beyond what her community can pay because Sigma can pay more. According to Cleonice, representatives of the water delivery company “explicitly” told her “that they would not renew their contract with us, that they were going to work with [Sigma] and that they could no longer serve our community.”

In recent months, she says, residents have had to cut back on baths and washing their clothes. Representatives from the Cinta Vermelha have been making trips to the state capital of Belo Horizonte hoping to obtain federal funds to buy a water truck for the community.

Lithium Research in a Protected Area

In May, MAB allied with state deputy Beatriz Cerqueira and local communities in a successful effort to repeal a Sigma permit to research lithium deposits in the Chapada do Lagoão, an Environmentally Protected Area (APA) outside of Araçuaí. MAB and Cerqueira submitted a complaint to the public prosecutor, alleging that the permit violated the rights of federally recognized quilombo communities, who did not receive “prior, free, informed and good faith consultation” as required by International Labor Organization Convention 169, which Brazil signed in 2002. MAB says the area is considered the “water tank of Araçuaí” and 300 families rely on the springs in the area for drinking water and subsistence farming.

Antonio Gomes represents farmers and laborers in the communities surrounding the city as the Political Director of the Union of Rural Workers of Araçuaí and lives within the protected area, where he grows pineapple and pequi fruit, a local staple. Gomes’s union voted in favor of the research permit, only to advocate to annul the permit months later.

At first, many union members thought, “We’ll let them research the area, but when they come back to ask to mine, we won’t authorize it,” says Gomes. Later, however, Gomes and community members considered the politics of the region. “If they research and find what they want, my god, it’ll be immediately liberated.” He says that MAB has been very involved in organizing and educating area residents. “Our population does not have much formal education,” says Gomes, “people don’t know where to find information on this.”

Gomes says he does not want the APA to undergo the disruption he has seen in Poço Dantas and Barreiros, small communities near the operational Sigma mine. According to both Gomes and MAB, residents complain of dust, noise that lasts long after midnight, and cracks emerging in their homes from explosions.

A Question of Resources

Even those who share these concerns find the unprecedented flow of resources difficult to turn down. As Program Coordinator for Araçuaí’s branch of the Popular Center for Culture and Development (CPCD), Marton Martins says the organization’s vote in favor of Sigma’s research permit was a vote for sorely needed information about the region. The CPCD has been involved in the APA area for years, developing permaculture sites, water capture systems, and youth education programs. “The Chapada is very large, and little understood. We know that it is a water source for the municipality. But there are no detailed technical studies of how it functions.” Martins says that a study locating the springs, detailing biome health and sanitation, and developing a management plan, which Sigma has proposed to fund, has long been “fundamental” to the CPCD’s aims to ensure water for the families in the area. The APA’s Council does not have the resources to take this on without outside help.

“The CPCD thinks of mining like the arrival of any other industry,” Martins explains. “How do they arrive, what compensation do they leave for the region?” Later he says, “A management plan [for the APA] would be an extremely important compensation.”

The CPCD said in a statement defending its vote in favor of Sigma’s research permit that in Jequitinhonha Valley “mining has occurred, is occurring, and will continue to occur.” They, like many others in the region, are left to navigate how their community might benefit and the limits that they are willing and able to impose.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on July 3, 2023. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

For weeks now, the people of Jujuy, Argentina, have been in the streets resisting right-wing political attacks on wages and the right to protest. In the past few days the conflict has escalated with severe police repression throughout the largely Indigenous and impoverished province.

Reports from on the ground show repression including massive deployments of riot police, people being chased in the streets and home invasions. However, there are also many videos of resistance, including huge marches, Native women working together to expel plainclothes police officers from their protests, and displays of solidarity from sugar workers and miners.

Much of the on-the-ground reporting from Jujuy has come from the La Izquierda Diario Network, a network of socialist websites I contribute to that includes Left Voice and La Izquierda Diario. The network is affiliated with the Party of Socialist Workers, which has recently been a growing influence in the province’s political landscape.

In question is a partial reform to the provincial constitution which opens more land in Jujuy to resource extraction while criminalizing various forms of protest. Jujuy is part of the “lithium triangle,” a region which holds more than 50 percent of the world’s lithium reserves. In the context of a global competition for lithium, Jujuy and other parts of the region are strategic targets for multinationals. This sets the stage for greater conflict between the communities who live and work in the region and capitalists seeking to expand relationships with foreign capital.

The right-wing governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales — whose party Radical Civic Union (UCR) holds the majority in the provincial legislature — quickly moved the reform along over the course of two weeks. In response, protests quickly mobilized outside the parliamentary compound and throughout the province.

The reform contains many points which have angered the province’s workers and large Indigenous community, in particular the “prohibition of roadblocks.” Roadblocks are one of the main tactics of peaceful protest that the Indigenous community has been using to make their opposition heard. At the same time Governor Morales is working to impose the reform, teachers throughout Argentina are fighting wage cuts. This has led teachers in Jujuy to unite their struggle with the movement against the constitutional reform.

Police have used rubber bullets and tear gas against the protesters. Mijael Lamas, a 17-year-old who lost an eye when police shot a rubber bullet at his head, has become a symbol of the repression. Health workers, journalists and even an elected official have been arrested. A video shows the police arresting Natalia Morales, a Jujuy legislator with the Party of Socialist Workers, by dragging her by the limbs along an asphalt road. She has since been released, but dozens of people with lower profiles remain detained or missing.

The legislature passed the reform with bipartisan support from the UCR and the center-left Justicialista Front on June 20. Representatives of the multiparty left opposition, the Left Unity Front, including Natalia Morales, have been denouncing the reform and joining the protests in the streets. As a result of the protests, Governor Morales suspended two articles of the reform, 36 and 50, which removed language from the provincial constitution codifying the rights of Indigenous people to practice their culture and stating that private property must not interfere with health, safety, freedom or human dignity, but the mobilizations have continued to demand a full repeal of the reform.

The movement is starting to gain support at the national level. On June 22, marches were held throughout the country in solidarity with the protests. Throughout the week, unions called strikes in solidarity. Some of the largest calls included the primary teachers union in Argentina, which called a national strike on June 21, and the Jujuy chapter of Confederación General del Trabajo, the largest trade union federation in Argentina, which held general strikes in Buenos Aires and Cordoba along with several other union federations.

Several human rights organizations and leading environmental activists have denounced the repression and amplified the struggle, including Amnesty International, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg.

Governor Morales, who is running for president in the upcoming 2023 election, is unlikely to back down without intense pressure. Whether or not he can successfully pass the reform in Jujuy will likely impact how much support he can get from sectors friendly to the extractionist policies he represents in Jujuy.

While the stakes are high for Morales, they are also high for workers and Indigenous people in Jujuy and throughout Argentina, who are suffering from a severe economic crisis. They are unlikely to put up with even lower wages and extraction by foreign capital. In this context, it’s no surprise that Jujuy has become the epicenter of struggle in Argentina, with no signs of resistance dying down any time soon.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on June 22, 2023. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

The documentary record of “mind control” experiments conducted by the United States and other governments during the Cold War is just the tip of the iceberg, and our collective ignorance is by design. In early 1973, as the fallout from the Watergate scandal exposed the need for greater congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ordered the destruction of all documents related to MK Ultra.

Launched in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the extent of Nazi atrocities carried out in the name of science, MK Ultra involved a range of grotesque experiments on unwitting test subjects within and beyond U.S. borders. Newly revealed evidence exposes previously hidden links between MK Ultra experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the U.S.

On April 20, 2023, a group of Indigenous women known as the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) achieved a milestone in their ongoing lawsuit against several entities, including McGill University, the Canadian government and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec. The parties reached an agreement whereby archeologists and cultural monitors would begin the process of searching for unmarked graves, which the Mohawk Mothers believe are buried on the grounds of the hospital.

Over the preceding two years, approximately 1,300 unmarked graves, most of them containing the remains of Indigenous children, have been discovered on the grounds of five of Canada’s former residential schools. Throughout the 20th century, the residential school system — like the Indian Boarding School system, its U.S. counterpart — separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families, stripped them of their language and subjected them to various forms of abuse amounting to what a truth and reconciliation commission called “cultural genocide.” But as these horrific revelations demonstrate, the harm wasn’t only cultural — a 1907 investigation found that nearly one-fourth of school attendees did not survive graduation.

In October of 2021, new evidence surfaced linking disappeared Indigenous children to MK Ultra experiments conducted by CIA-sponsored researchers. A white Winnipeg resident named Lana Ponting testified in Quebec’s Superior Court that in 1958, when she was 16 years old, doctors from the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill and the Royal Victoria Hospital, held her against her will, drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and exposed her to auditory indoctrination: playing a recording telling Ponting over and over again, that she was either “a bad girl” or “a good girl.”

Ponting also testified that “some of the children I saw there were Indigenous,” and that she befriended an Indigenous girl named Morningstar, who endured many of the same abuses, with the added indignity of being harassed because of her race. During a reprieve from her drug-induced haze, Ponting recalls sneaking out at night and happening upon “people standing over by the cement wall” with shovels and flashlights. She and other children had heard rumors that bodies were buried on the property. “I believe that some of them would be Indigenous people,” Ponting told the court.

Not only does her testimony corroborate what another Allan Memorial Institute survivor told historian Donovan King a decade earlier, but in 2008, the Squamish Nation included the psychiatric hospital in a list of potential sites containing unmarked graves.

The CIA, along with the U.S. and Canadian military and powerful U.S. charitable foundations, are directly implicated in this ordeal. According to John Mark’s 1991 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Steven Kinzer’s 2019 book Poisoner in Chief, in 1977, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, CIA archivists uncovered a previously hidden box of MK Ultra financial records revealing, among other things, that the Memorial Institute was home to MK Ultra “Subproject 68.” Under the leadership of psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, whom Ponting accused of raping ­her, experiments in this subproject sought to “depattern” people’s minds using violent methods Cameron termed “psychic driving.”

Although Cameron is among the most infamous MK Ultra doctors, he was not alone at McGill. As historian Alfred McCoy has shown in his 2006 book A Question of Torture, the sensory deprivation research of Donald Hebb, a McGill psychologist, was also covertly sponsored by the CIA.

“I feel like we’re closer to having our future generations heard, our past generations heard, and whatever has happened to our children that they have purpose,” remarked Kwetiio, after she and the other Mohawk Mothers won an injunction to halt construction near the potential grave sites. As part of their struggle to uncover the truth, the mothers and their supporters have been collecting archival documents related to McGill experiments. Although none of them incontrovertibly prove their suspicions, the court’s recent injunction compelling McGill to expedite the release of restricted files has generated optimism that more pieces of the puzzle will soon come to light.

But what the Mohawk Mothers and their allies have found is compelling, particularly for me: I have spent the last several years researching the history of “behavior modification” programs in U.S. prisons. My forthcoming book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (available in October 2023), uncovers the roots of the modern prison abolitionist movement and state efforts to destroy it during the 1960s and 1970s. It details a little-known program of prison-based scientific experimentation that intersects with the Mohawk Mothers struggle.

In 1966, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, whose family foundation helped establish the Allan Memorial Institute, launched a partnership whereby a team of McGill consultants were brought to New York to establish programs and conduct research at the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, according to Canadian psychiatrist Bruno Cormier’s 1975 book The Watcher and the Watched. Located in a remote hamlet 25 miles south of New York’s northernmost border with Quebec, the institution confined prisoners who were transferred from other state facilities after being deemed “insane” by prison doctors.

The official purpose of the collaboration was to develop new methods for preventing recidivism. However, the program hosted “experimental studies of various aspects of criminal behavior,” noted a report from 1968. The following year an attendee of a conference about the program noted that a large number of its participants were Black.

An affidavit authored by anthropologist Phillippe Blouin in support of the Mohawk Mothers identified the late psychiatrist Cormier as a person of interest. Blouin located correspondence between lead “Subproject 68” psychologist Cameron and Cormier, who worked as a clinician at the Allan Memorial Institute during the 1950s and 1960s. Authored between 1957 and 1963, the exchanges pertain to a proposal for a Pilot Centre for Juvenile Delinquency, which would include laboratories “for psychological studies, for work in genetics, for endocrinological investigations, for sociological studies, both within the unit and also for field work.”

Commenting on the proposal, Cormier suggests that the center’s purview should not be limited to rehabilitation. He stresses that “research of this kind should bring light on all behavioral problems” and that it had the potential to “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.”

Not long after this exchange, New York officials selected him to lead the Memorial Institute’s partnership with the New York prison system. The man who helped make this happen was a German physician named Ludwig Fink, who became assistant director and subsequently director of the Dannemora hospital after practicing psychiatry in Iran and India during the 1940s. By 1969, Fink and some of the McGill consultants had trained prison guards in hypnosis and aversion therapy techniques, resulting in scenes that an observer called “quite revolting both for those who watched and those who took part.”

The director of a think tank called the Narcotic and Drug Research Institute described Fink’s “Therapeutic Community” program in ways that are eerily similar to Cameron’s efforts to obliterate human consciousness in order to rebuild it anew. It “takes you back to a kind of kindergarten level and then brings you back up,” he told Congress. Elsewhere, Fink cites the autobiography of Malcolm X and laments the “growing number of aggressive, assertive black males” behind prison walls.

The Mohawk Mothers affidavit mentions Ernest G. Poser, a psychologist, whose research at McGill investigated “cross-cultural differences in tolerance to physical pain using deceptive means and what seemed like torture instruments.” It indicates that Poser “studied patients’ reactions to hypnotic suggestion during methohexitone-induced sleep,” a practice that brings Ponting’s experience of being “brainwashed” to mind. Poser, a colleague of McGill psychologist and sensory deprivation researcher Hebb, was also experimenting on incarcerated people in New York. In 1968, he investigated whether prisoners deemed “sociopaths” suffer from an adrenaline deficiency that prevents them from learning from “fear-producing experiences.”

To find out, he and a graduate student named Deborah G. Sittman injected them with adrenaline and subjected them to electric shocks. Wilfrid Derby, a student of Poser and Hebb, proposed an experiment in which multiple prisoners would be strapped to an electroconvulsive therapy device and told they were in a competitive situation where the “loser” would receive the shock level set for him by his opponent.

Between September 9 and 13, 1971, nearly 1,300 incarcerated people rebelled in New York’s Attica prison. Most of them were Black, but a few, such as John Boncore “Dacajeweiah” Hill were Mohawk. New York’s partnership with McGill appears to have ended shortly after the uprising and the brutal state-orchestrated massacre that followed it. At roughly the same time, the Dannemora State Hospital was rebranded the Adirondack Correctional Treatment Education Center, and became home to a “new” behavior modification initiative called the Prescription (Rx) Program.

Multiple letters published by prisoners’ rights organizations accused prison authorities of surreptitiously drugging their food and water and of attempting to turn them into “zombies.” A government panel noted that the program evoked “the spectre of the resocialization, rethinking, and brainwashing camps of totalitarian societies.”

According to Walter Dunbar, who had recently left the California prison system to become New York’s deputy corrections commissioner, the Rx Program focused on prisoners guilty of “overt acts that incite, agitate, and provoke other inmates to militant, radical, and antisocial activities.” Such statements link the program to plantation discourses that pathologize Black resistance, while implicating prison authorities in the use of behavior modification techniques for political ends: counterinsurgency.

Notably, Dunbar’s name appears multiple times in a cache of documents released via FOIA by the CIA. The documents discuss agency-sponsored narcotics research on incarcerated people in Vacaville Medical Facility, a California prison that helped inspire the New York prison system’s partnership with McGill.

The state-sponsored experiments of the Cold War era employed a range of scandalous methods to test whether human thoughts and behavior could be predictably controlled. The outcome of this research and the fate of its victims remain obscure, but a common thread runs across different experimental contexts. Researchers targeted and assaulted vulnerable populations who were incapable of granting consent and who were viewed as disposable. Their allegations were unlikely to be taken seriously and their avenues for redress were limited because they were institutionalized and from marginalized groups: Indigenous people, Black people, poor people, disabled people, children, prisoners, women and girls. This scientific violence was shaped by living legacies of colonialism and slavery, violence that continues to find expression in the ongoing “war on terror.”

While we may never know the full truth, we owe it to those harmed and killed to illuminate their stories. Groups like the Mohawk Mothers have promised to keep digging.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 13, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A delegation of Indigenous leaders from Brazil is in Peru this week to join forces with their counterparts there who are fighting to stop proposed legislation many critics call the “genocide bill” due to fears its passage could result in uncontacted tribes being wiped out by fossil fuel companies and other rapacious resource extractors.

Members of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (UNIVAJA), a coalition of tribes from the Amazon region, joined the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP) and the Regional Organization of Eastern Indigenous Peoples (ORPIO) on Tuesday during a joint session of Peru’s Congress ahead of a Wednesday meeting of a congressional decentralization committee debating 3518/2022-CR, a bill that would modify a law protecting uncontatced tribes.

“For the Indigenous, there are no borders. This is an invention of the states,” UNIVAJA coordinator Bushe Matis said at the Peruvian Congress on Tuesday. “If the project were approved, it is very dangerous, as happened with my people, the Matsés, who were contacted in 1976 and caught the flu, which killed many people.”

Speaking at the same press conference, AIDESEP president Jorge Pérez said that “just as there are beneficial laws, there are also laws that can harm. In our opinion, this bill is negative.”

The proposed legislation was introduced by Peruvian Congressman Jorge Morante Figari, a member of the far-right Popular Force party run by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Right-wing lawmakers are trying to push the bill through amid the deadly political chaos that followed the December 2022 ouster of former leftist leader Pedro Castillo and what opponents call a political coup by unelected U.S.-backed President Dina Boluarte.

Critics say that the 25 uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous peoples in Peru who have been officially recognized could lose that recognition if the bill is passed, that reserves established for these people could be revoked with no prospect for the allocation of new reserves, and that Indigenous lands will be subject to further exploitation by fossil fuel, logging, and mining companies.

Peru’s Ministry of Culture says 3518/2022-CR “represents a danger to the protection of the life and territory of the Indigenous peoples.”

The proposal has sparked worldwide alarm, with the British, Canadian, and German ambassadors to Peru signing a joint letter urging the decentralization committee to shelve the legislation. More than 10,000 people have also signed a petition against the bill.

Teresa Mayo of the London-based Indigenous rights group Survival International—which calls 3518/2022-CR “a naked land grab by the oil and gas industry”—said Tuesday that “the genocide bill is the most serious attack on Peru’s uncontacted tribes in decades.”

“All the rights and protections that Peru’s Indigenous people and their allies have fought so hard for, over many years, are now at risk of being extinguished with a stroke of the pen,” Mayo continued.

“These rights are under attack in Brazil too, which is why Indigenous people have joined hands across the Peru-Brazil border to fight these genocidal plans,” she added. “It’s a moment of desperate danger—the very survival of dozens of uncontacted tribes is now at risk.”

While Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, has centered Indigenous rights during his five-month administration, the Brazilian Congress—which is controlled by right-wing lawmakers—last month voted to limit the power of a pair of ministries tasked with protecting Indigenous peoples and the environment.

Survival International reported earlier this year that 3518/2022-CR was drafted by Peruvian legislators with ties to fossil fuel corporations, including Perenco, an Anglo-French oil company operating inside uncontacted tribes’ lands. Perenco and other companies, as well as right-wing Peruvian lawmakers, are trying to block finalization of the Napo-Tigre Indigenous Reserve, which would protect five isolated communities from intrusion and exploitation of lands and resources by extractive interests.

This story was produced by Ricochet Media and IndigiNews, and is being co-published by The Real News.

As he watched the last plane lumber down the runway, Chief Allan Adam was finally able to breathe freely again. 

He had just posted a live video from the Fort Chipewyan airport on the evening of May 31, documenting the last flight out with evacuees fleeing impending disaster. A wildfire was advancing approximately seven kilometres from his remote community, which is accessible only by boat or plane.

But the relief was short-lived. The straight-shooting leader of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, one of three Indigenous communities in Alberta who call Fort Chipewyan home, was abruptly hit with biting pain.

“That was the stress that hit me, right after that post, that’s when the pain came to my neck,” he said in a telephone interview the evening of June 1, between back-to-back meetings with local leaders, authorities, and firefighting officials.

Despite the searing ache in his neck, he continues to roll with the punches. The homes and livelihoods of nearly 1,000 people are on the line. It’s the first time in anyone’s living memory that the hamlet, located about 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, has been under a mandatory evacuation order. Chief Adam — together with Billy-Joe Tuccaro, chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, and Kendrick Cardinal, president of the Fort Chip Métis — has stayed behind to oversee efforts to save his homelands.

“We had to get everybody out. Everything that we’ve done, that was our main focus, to get everybody out immediately. And then once that was accomplished, it was a relief for me because now we can focus our attention on preparedness (for) what’s coming.”

Record heat waves and dry conditions have sparked an unrivaled wildfire season of destruction across the country, affecting almost every province and territory.

In May, roughly 2.7 million hectares of forest — an area equal to about five million football fields — were burned to the ground in Canada, said Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair at a press conference. Over the last 10 years, the average number of hectares burned in the same month was just 150,000.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told reporters at the same press conference that the rampant infernos are caused by climate change.

“It’s a simple fact that Canada is experiencing the impacts of climate change, including more frequent and more extreme wildfires,” he said.

Chief Adam is all too familiar with the consequences of climate change, and particularly the contamination of his territories. Fort Chipewyan, commonly referred to as Fort Chip, is downstream from Alberta’s notorious tar sands, one of the largest oil developments in the world.

The settlement is perched on the tip of Lake Athabasca, the largest body of water in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Known as the oldest community in the province, it once served as a hub for the Indigenous Nations who live up and down the mighty Athabasca River, as well as the European settlers who trekked north for trade. But since commercial-scale extraction of the oil sands began in 1967 — and then expanded to fuel the economic wellspring of Canada — the water, land and air quality of the vast Indigenous territories downstream has deteriorated.

Finding deformed fish and polluted water here is a normal occurrence. And dozens of Fort Chip residents have succumbed to a rare strain of bile duct cancer. 

In April, Chief Adam testified before a House of Commons committee hearing in Ottawa to decry the release of millions of litres of toxic tailings waste in two separate incidents involving Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine. Just weeks later, Suncor reported it had released almost six million liters of contaminated water into a tributary of the Athabasca River.

Earlier, he had predicted his community would become environmental refugees.

Now, Fort Chip could be swept away by out-of-control flames.

“I tell them this,” he said during the phone interview, explaining that he confronts the Alberta and federal governments about climate change.

“I speak with them all the time and we hold them very accountable. The climate change issue is not going to go away. And we’re gonna have to deal with it — and you (governments) are gonna have to deal with us.”

Feels like 2016 all over again 

About 250 kilometres south from Fort Chip, the boat launch in Fort McKay First Nation — a community of 800 people about 58 kilometres north of Fort McMurray — is clogged with dozens of docked boats. Volunteers are patrolling the river day and night, searching for evacuees whose boats may have gotten stuck or broken down.

It’s déjà vu for Fort McKay residents, who are survivors of the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. They were forced to flee their homes during the massive 2016 blaze that ravaged Fort McMurray. 

Even so, ushering Fort Chip evacuees to safety is a treacherous undertaking, according to Fort McKay Métis Nation president Ron Quintal.

“There’s a combination of the smoke, of the water coming up and having sticks in the water and traveling at night — it’s a concern for damage to your boat and could cause an emergency,” he says while visiting evacuees at a hotel in Fort McMurray. 

Quintal directed his staff to focus on comforting the displaced, including whole families with children and elders who had made the eleventh-hour trip. 

“We were there when families were pulling in,” says Quintal, his voice pinched with emotion. “You try to put on a happy face. These kids, they’re afraid, you know, they’ve had to leave their homes, given they’re an isolated community. And we let them know that you’re safe here, we’re here to help you.”

Jimmy Shortman, 64, waits at the boat launch for Ginger, his German Shepard, and her six three-week-old puppies to be delivered by a peace officer. He fled his home in Fort Chip by boat along with his wife and granddaughter. His beloved dog was cared for by officials in Fort McKay while he escorted his family to a hotel in Fort McMurray.

Shortman also fled the infamous Fort McMurray blaze in 2016. Now, he’s experiencing flashbacks of flames, falling ashes, and traffic jams holding back frantic passengers desperate to escape.

A former firefighter, he witnessed the moment the current wildfire ignited near his home community.

“When that lightning happened on Saturday in Fort Chip, I was outside my house, sitting on the deck. All of a sudden, lightning strikes.” His brown eyes widen as he describes the jolt of electricity hitting the ground.

“It started that night, because the lightning did it. It got bigger and bigger, and the wind was picking up.”

He did not expect the blaze would burn out of control and turn so many lives upside down. He describes people panicking in their rush to get out of Fort Chip. “My wife was scared and crying. Everybody was excited to just get out of there.”

“There were 14 boats trying to get out at the same time, and that’s unheard of. You couldn’t even see across the lake — it was covered in smoke. I don’t panic, but.…” His eyes briefly well with tears. “The only thing I worried about was my wife and the little girl.”

Now, he’s happy to be heading out to his cabin along the river with his brother, Stanley Shortman, about an hour and a half south of the fire. He feels most comfortable there, as do hundreds of other Fort Chip families whose cabin homes dot the shoreside. They have a kinship with the land and water. Many, like Shortman, spend half their lives in the wilderness of their territories. 

Shortman says he will clean the yard around his cabin while he waits out the fire. But he predicts the situation will intensify.

“Look how hot May was.” Shaking his head, he emphasizes that the dry weather isn’t helping. “We haven’t gotten hardly any rain yet. Wait ’til July. Wait ’til it’s really hot. Oh, it’ll be worse. It’s scary.  Maybe the whole country will burn.”

‘Praying helps’

The oldest resident evacuated from Fort Chip rests in her bed at the long-term care facility in Fort McKay. Madelaine Piche, 93, clutches a sparkling rosary, her milky brown eyes conveying a gentle naivety.

“I’m so tired,” she says with a sigh. “I’m scared, I was nervous inside the plane.”

Along with several other elders, Piche was airlifted out of Fort Chip and transported to the Fort McKay facility on May 30. She’s comfortable, she says, and the food is “good here.” 

The view of the river outside her window reminds her of home.

Now Piche — grandmother of 43 and great-grandmother to countless great-grandchildren —  patiently waits for one of her daughters to visit from Fort McMurray.

She cries as she prays for her hometown, the only place she’s ever lived.

“Fort Chip is beautiful.… Praying helps,” she says with a whisper. “I pray a lot for everybody and for it to stop burning.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of displaced residents are scattered in various hotels throughout Fort McMurray. The Municipality of Wood Buffalo’s Emergency Social Services department is accepting donations of essential supplies such as toiletries, clothing, diapers, baby wipes and menstrual products. Families gather in hotel parking lots to catch up on the latest updates about the wildfires and let their children play on the grass.

But essential supplies for cabin dwellers are needed. 

Riding the river

Mikisew Cree Nation evacuees Matthew Coutoreille and Yancey Kaskamin volunteer to deliver packages of food and water to nine cabins spread out along the river. They work alongside Coutoreille’s father, Lloyd Donovan, a resident of Fort McKay. 

After sorting through various dried goods, gassing up, and loading their boats, the crew embarks on a Friday morning mission that will last until dusk.

Coutoreille, 36, has travelled the river since he was a young boy. He knows every bend swirling throughout the hundreds of kilometres of his homelands. He studies the current and weaves in and around sandbars, islands and debris to safely navigate his boat.

“My grandpa was one of the old-timers that used to come up and down this river,” he says in a calm and steady voice.

“You always have to have an eye out here. When you’re travelling with the old-timers, they tell you where the rocks are, where the sticks are and where to go. So I’ve learned from them.”

The river is ever-changing and unpredictable. Coutoreille is an environmental monitor for the Mikisew Cree. He observes the dwindling water levels as a result of impacts from industry and B.C. Hydro’s damming system. It makes maneuvering the river more dangerous. 

“You can tell how much water dropped here and if it’s safe. And it’s gotten worse over the years because of water levels. Now everything is just drying up.”

A thick, smoggy gray haze blankets the horizon. Another wildfire to the east of the river a few hours south of Fort Chip is colliding with the smoke blowing in from there — as if Armageddon were descending upon the territory.

But Courtoreille isn’t afraid. He’s fixated on the task of helping his neighbours. Approaching the mouth of Lake Athabasca, he slows to assess the strength of the winds.  

“It’s going to be rough.” He winks with a slight smile and takes a shallow breath.

After pulling on a hoodie and securing the boat canopy, he confers with his father and Kaskamin. They will steer their boats in the direction of the northeast-blowing winds.

Courtoreille nods as if to reassure me as he explains his boat is designed to take on water at the bow. If the waves are not navigated properly, they can swamp an open boat or capsize it. He’s crossed the lake in poorer conditions and is confident in his ability to safely do it again.

“Let’s get ’er done!” yells Donovan.

Motors roar in succession. Courtoreille leads the way to create a trail for the ensuing boats to have a smoother ride. After a harrowing 15-minute journey of dodging full-length logs and climbing whitecaps that crash against the boat, Courtoreille securely guides us to a bay in Fort Chip.

Whirling sounds of helicopters flying to and from the small airport penetrate the stillness of the near-empty hamlet. Pickup trucks, emergency vehicles and ATVs intermittently race between the emergency command centre in the middle of town and areas that personnel are working to fireproof.

Sheets of smoke billow into the sky less than three kilometres from Alison Bay, a residential area of the Mikisew Cree Nation on the boundaries of Fort Chip. Workers have dug trenches to the lake there to make the water more accessible. 

Excavators clear fields of trees and shrubs surrounding the Mikisew community and Fort Chip. Pumps connected to water hoses supply a web of sprinklers attached to the rooftops of homes and other structures around town.

At an emergency meeting that evening of approximately 200 people, including local leaders, authorities, firefighters and community volunteers, one person yells out that they will work through the night to protect Fort Chip.

Chief Adam echoes the sentiment: whatever it takes to keep the fire at bay. 

“We can cut grass, remove all the garbage and debris, and do all these little things,” he tells the crowd, appearing exhausted but unwavering.

“We will make it happen. If the fire does come into the community, we will assist in some way with the fire department,” he says. “But the forest fire, that belongs to Alberta Forestry and the professional firefighters. Now a lot of prayers are with us from other communities. Stay strong.”

After a hot meal, volunteers line up to attest to their skills so officials can enter them into a database.

It has been stressful to coordinate a community-led emergency operation at times, says Jay Telegdi, intergovernmental relations senior manager for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Yet he has been down this road before. He helped evacuate members of Fort McKay Métis Nation in 2016. Now he buckles down to make sure every community member on the ground is assigned a task.

No time to contemplate causes

Calvin Waquan, Mikisew Cree, is the general manager of the Chief’s Corner gas station and convenience store in Fort Chip. He didn’t question staying behind to keep the store open when others closed their businesses down and left. After kissing his wife and two young children goodbye at the airport so they could fly to safety and find shelter in a Fort McMurray hotel, he sprang into action.

He cooks meals every day for up to 150 people in his store’s kitchen and caters to the varied schedules of anyone needing cigarettes, snacks or toiletries. He’s tallying the purchases on a charge basis, having buyers sign receipts for reimbursement from the province, which he says will be covering the full costs.

“I’m here to serve,” he says while mopping the store floor.

“I know one guy in town already passed out and fainted. So I’m making sure I get a lot of fruit and vegetables in me. And I don’t want my wife to come home right now.” He stops to laugh.  “Because it’s pretty messy around the kitchen at home. But I’ve been trying to listen to what she used to tell me about taking in nutrients and vitamins.”

Waquan is a former elected councillor of the Mikisew Cree Nation. He lobbied governments for compensation and accountability from the oil industry for damages to his territories. Lately, he’s noticed rapid changes to the seasons.  

“We had the winter road come in way late this year, the water was open right until January. And now this.”

But in an active emergency, there isn’t much time to contemplate root causes. Every night since the evacuation, before he heads home to catch a few hours of sleep, Waquan sets up a table outside the store with two filled coffee urns, cream, sugar and a package of cookies for workers.

He speaks to his family daily, although he tries to avoid video calling them.

“It’s tough because it’s emotional. It’s tough on my daughter, she cries and then I start crying. The way I see fires, what’s happening with Mother Nature, it’s kind of resetting and teaching us a lesson to slow down maybe and appreciate what we have. And I think that’s what the families are learning and especially myself. Not having the kids being in here grabbing a slush, kids running by to go to the park or just hanging out on the concrete outside — I miss seeing the kids and all the noise that’s always going on.”

 Lifelong Fort Chip resident Doris Cardinal works at the K’ai Talle Market a few blocks from Chief’s Corner. She and her husband, Happy, chose not to leave.

“This is my home and I wasn’t going to go anywhere,” she says while having a break outside the market. “I’d be afraid if I see the fire coming over the hills, then I’d run for the water.”

Cardinal is still processing the news that her cabin burned down two days prior. The home she and her husband built along the river just three years ago was their retirement plan. It was located north of Fort Chip, around the corner of what’s called Devil’s Gate, by Little Rapids, she explains.

She grew up on the land and river. It’s a special place she goes to wind down and take in the northern lights while sipping strong tea.

“Some of the leaders went up in the choppers and took a snapshot. And then my niece told me my house burned. I shed tears, I’m not gonna lie, and I swore. It was not the greatest feeling.”

Cardinal’s was one of several cabins devoured by the wildfire. Her husband vows to rebuild one day. For now, Cardinal is immersed in keeping the market afloat and lifting the morale of others on the ground.

“As long as the robins are singing, I’ll be okay,” she says with a chuckle.

Enter the army

That afternoon the Fort Chip airport is abuzz with anticipation as local rangers, chiefs and workers congregate to welcome the Canadian military. A gray Lockheed C-130 Hercules plane rumbles down the airstrip as a crowd watches in awe from behind a metal fence.

The warplane is carrying 65 soldiers dressed in camo and combat boots ready to battle the flames. It will return with dozens more soldiers later that evening.

The encroaching wildfire is less than three kilometres away, and smoke is descending on the site. 

Chief Adam paces the parking lot while recording a Facebook live video. His long silver hair is tied back, and his shoulders slightly droop from an overwhelming cocktail of emotions. His eyes light up at the sight of the incoming army, and a grin emerges.

Kendrick Cardinal, the Fort Chip Métis Nation president, greets each soldier with a handshake as they march to an awaiting bus that will shuttle them to their command post.

He feels relieved. “I’m happy the army is here to help us out. It’s more manpower. With their help we’ll try to extinguish the fire as soon as possible.” 

Officials are unsure when it will be safe for evacuees to return home. As of June 8, the wildfire has scorched over 31,000 hectares, and firefighters have so far been able to hold it back from Fort Chip.

But firefighters have their work cut out for them across the country. According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, there are over 400 fires actively burning in Canada, 240 of which are deemed out of control.

The effects of the wildfires are far-reaching. A thick haze drifted into parts of the northern United States mid-week, blotting out the sun, and creating a Code Red air quality level for millions of people.

Chief Adam notes a large influx of moose flies swarming the airport. The large insects, known for sending irritated moose into a frenzy, bite chunks of human and animal flesh in order to reproduce. 

But it’s too early for moose flies, he says. They usually don’t appear until well into July.

It’s another sign something is off with the patterns of Mother Nature. 

“Climate change is such a part of this, everything ties into it,” he says with frustration.

He declares he’ll continue confronting government leaders who push the status quo of excessive oil production up the river, which is exacerbating carbon emissions. 

“(The Alberta government’s) let-it-burn policy has to change because it’s gonna get worse. It’s burning out of control.”

From the defeat of the coup government in Bolivia, the election of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, and the rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, to the historic election of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and the return of Lula in Brazil, left-leaning governments are changing the political landscape of Latin America. However, even more progressive parties and ruling coalitions have failed to rein in the violence of the resource extraction economy and the domineering power of international capital flowing through mining, drilling, and deforestation operations across the hemisphere. Indigenous and environmental activists from Ecuador to Bolivia say that today’s extractivist economy perpetuates the violence of colonial domination, and warn that things are only going to get worse over the course of the 21st century. 

In the latest installment of The Marc Steiner Show‘s special collaborative series with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), we speak with a panel of Indigenous leaders, environmental activists, and scholars about how extractivism has come to dominate the politics and economics of Latin America, and what forms the anti-extractivist resistance is taking at the local and international level.

Patricia Gualinga is an Indigenous Kichwa leader and lifelong defender of the Amazon rainforest in her community of Sarayaku, Ecuador. 

Pablo Poveda is a radical economist who works at the Center for Studies of Labor and Agrarian Development (CEDLA), a non-profit think tank in La Paz, Bolivia.

Teresa A. Velásquez is an associate professor of anthropology at California State University, San Bernardino, and the author of Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. 

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara
Post-Production: Tom Lattanand, Bret Gustafson, Marc Steiner 
Audio Post-Production: Tom Lattanand
Translation by: Bret Gustasfson, Adriana Garriga-López, Maria Haro Sly
Voiceover Readers: Adriana Garriga-López, Rael Mora 

Read NACLA: nacla.org
Get updates from NACLA: nacla.org/newsletter
Follow NACLA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NACLA
Donate to NACLA: nacla.org/donate

For more in-depth coverage of Ecuador and Bolivia from NACLA, please visit nacla.org.

Transcript

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us. The Real News and the North American Congress on Latin America, known as NACLA, have launched a podcast series to probe the contemporary issues in Latin America that affect Latin America and the entire planet. In our opening segment, we saw the emergence of the pink tide in the early 2000s, with left-leaning presidents winning in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina. And now we’re in the midst of another pink tide. We saw Lula freed from prison, which we just talked about, coming back to power in Brazil, and then the election of young progressives like Gabriel Boric in Chile. In Mexico, Lopez Obrador. The amazing victory of the former revolutionary fighter, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and the ongoing dominance of the socialist MAS party in Bolivia, first with the Indigenous Evo Morales and now with Luis Arce.

Now, despite the victories of the left, South America remains deeply divided, and the new governments of the left must address serious economic challenges that a legacy of imperialism and the intervention of the US over these last 120-plus years. And today it continues. The exploitation of natural resources created a dependence on what we now call “extractive economies.” Whether it’s mining for minerals, drilling for oil or gas, or destroying forests – Like the Amazon being turned into pastures for cattle, and fuels for soy that bring with it a total social environmental destruction, devastating many people in these countries and the environment around them – It threatens the entire planet. 

These resources extracted from the earth are usually exported without any processing. So when global prices are high, things can look pretty good, but if the price of commodities drop, economies can go into a tailspin like what happened in Venezuela when the price of oil plummeted. So the effect of extractionism and extraction is really far-reaching. Mines produce toxic waste, contaminating water supplies. Oil and gas do the exact same thing, and they don’t even create any widespread employment. Deforestation exacerbates climate change, creates inequality that pushes small farmers off their land. On top of that, extractive industries create social conflicts that are often experienced most severely by women, who are marginalized from their labor opportunities that do exist, and also at the moment, as always, have to confront sexual violence. 

So how is the second wave of left and progressive governments confronting their dependence on extractivism? How does that affect the economies? Can they change the dynamic and obtain control? Can they avoid the negative environmental and social impacts? And how are the social movements and activists responding to all of this? What are the alternatives, if any, and what would a real progressive government look like?

Well, that’s what we’re going to explore today. And to help us wrestle all of this, my co-host is Brett Gustafson. He’s co-executive editor of NACLA. He’s a political anthropologist, professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. And his latest book is Bolivia in the Age of Gas, that traces the struggles of natural gas in Bolivia under the 14 years of Evo Morales. And he’s done extensive work with Indigenous people in Bolivia as well. So welcome, Bret, great to have you with us.

Bret Gustafson:  Thank you, Marc. It’s great to be here. I’ll introduce our guests today. We’re very happy to have guests from Ecuador and Bolivia with us. In Ecuador, the left-leaning president, Raphael Correa, led the country for a decade. While many celebrated his efforts to redistribute wealth, he also expanded mining and oil activities, and he often attacked and criticized, even criminalized, the environmentalists and Indigenous organizations who questioned these activities. And now the country has shifted back to the right with a new president. 

Today our guests include Patricia Gualinga, who is an Indigenous leader of the Kichwa people of Sarayaku Ecuador. She’s also the international relations director for the Kichwa First People of Sarayaku, a region that has been fighting for rights and for the environment for many years. We also have Teresa Velasquez, an anthropologist and professor at Cal State Santa Barbara, who has studied anti-mining movements in Ecuador and the Andes, and is the author of Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. Welcome to you both. And from Bolivia, we have Pablo Poveda, who is an economist who works for CSLA, the Center for Studies of Labor in La Paz, Bolivia. Welcome, Pablo.

Marc, you were thinking about the longer colonial history and the colonial legacies behind extractivism. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about what you were talking about?

Marc Steiner:  As I was thinking about the crisis with extractivism in Latin America, I thought about how this really is a 400-year legacy. It begins with the Spanish and the Portuguese and the exploitation of the land, and the genocide against Indigenous people, and the mining for gold and silver, and all that comes with that. It is important to think through that, including the 120-plus years of US imperialism throughout Latin America and the effect that has had. So there’s a historical root that gave rise to what we’re facing today with all these issues. And I thought that I’d like everybody to jump in on this and give their thoughts on what this means. But I want to start with Patricia to talk about what that historical legacy means and how it affects this moment.

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] Well, for Indigenous peoples, the issue of extractivism has been terrible, fatal. It has violated the people’s rights, it has destroyed our nature. And really, in some ways, the states and the companies have not followed the law, the constitution, or even the court rulings that we have been able to achieve in response to these violations. For us, extractivism is lethal. It implies the disappearance of the peoples, and it implies the violation of all our human rights.

Marc Steiner:  Pablo, if you want to leap in on this as well, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Pablo Poveda:  [Translated from Spanish] Extractivism is a historical consequence in Bolivia. First, capitalism was not born from the internal contradictions of the Bolivian economy, but rather came from the outside. Therefore, there was no development of a strong internal economy, and there was no mass expropriation of land for campesinos, which led to the rise of capital. And now these forms of backward production, which the ruling mass party refers to as the “plural economy,” are functional to both capitalism, exploitation of labor, and exploitation of nature. That’s why, from this perspective, we define Bolivia as a backward country with a mixed economy that lives largely off the rents, or the revenues, generated from the exploitation of natural resources.

This history sets the foundation for present-day extractivism and the cycle of gas extraction from 2000 to 2022. And this is under the complete hegemony of transnational capital. There’s no local bourgeois involved. Nonetheless, the economy entered into an accelerated downturn beginning in 2015. At its highest point, exports were over $6 billion per year, and now the income from gas is only around $2 billion per year.

We’re also experiencing a cycle of gold extraction from 2011-present under the control of private mining cooperatives, which is a form of backward production that the current government is promoting in alliance with capital from China and other countries in the region. Compared to the sale of gas, which at least leaves 50% revenues to the national government, this mining cycle does nothing for the state. Gold mining largely operates through illegal means, and it has a major environmental impact because it uses mercury for processing the gold. Bolivia has become the main global importer of mercury in the world since 2020. In conclusion, Bolivia cannot overcome its primary position as a country dependent on revenues from exporting unprocessed raw materials in a framework of capitalist relations of production. And now, Bolivia is waiting for the renewable energy transition to exploit new raw materials, like lithium.

Bret Gustafson:  Thanks, Pablo. That was a really great historical overview of Bolivia with parallels in Ecuador. It really helps us to think about these cycles of extraction; from silver to tins, to oil to gas, now to gold, maybe to lithium next, and also that relationship with foreign capital. This is a theme we definitely want to come back to, Marc. So thanks so much for that historical overview. We’ll circle back to Bolivia in just a moment, but I’d like to turn to Patricia now to tell us a little bit more about the current relationship with the government in Ecuador.

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] The Indigenous people and the Indigenous Movement have not had any government that really listens to their proposals. There has always been confrontation over the topic of extractivism. In this part of the Amazon, it’s the extraction of oil. In the south of the Amazon, it’s mining and the issue of water. This government is no different from the previous government or the one before that. This government is also extractivist, and it is right-wing. There have been strong Indigenous mobilizations where people have lost their lives. 

The problem is that the entire economic model in Ecuador is based on extractivism: whether it’s oil, mining, forestry, the list goes on. In this sense, there is a very strong struggle. We are waging in our territories. In the north, we have weekly reports of oil spills in the Amazon, mostly from pipeline failures that are contaminating water sources. And in the south, where our Shuar brothers and sisters are, we know that there is open-pit mining where there are all kinds of rights violations.

The tactics are always the same. They try to divide the local people with promises that are never upheld. The government stigmatizes the leaders who protest, persecutes, and criminalizes them. This has intensified in recent years. There has always been repression, but with the previous government of Correa this became much more visible, and the new government has followed the same recipe. So for us, whether governments of the left or the right come into power, we have not seen great changes, because the model is always built the same way. Some of them let us speak, some of them prohibit us from speaking, but they always violate our rights.

Bret Gustafson:  Well, that’s a wake-up call to many people on the progressive side of things. You sometimes celebrate the election of left governments. Might we say that the arrival of the left changed anything at all in relation to this longer history of extractivism, whether in Ecuador or Bolivia?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] I don’t doubt that the governments receive funds, but this entire extractivist practice has generated corruption at all levels. We cannot say that we are living in a country where these returns are reaching the most needy. There is an overwhelming level of corruption that has led to Ecuador being in a profound crisis – A total crisis – And things have become very polarized. In recent years, there has been terrible polarization. Either they want to put us on the right or they want to put us on the left, and they have forgotten that we Indigenous people are not one or the other. I don’t consider myself of the left or of the right. We are people who demand social justice, respect for the rights of nature, and the real implementation of a plurinational state.

Everybody knows that corruption in these governments has also penetrated the justice system. So if we try to work through the justice system, we don’t know if we are going to achieve justice. As we have seen over time, those who have power, regardless of what political line they come from, also control the justice system. So we are in a situation in which extractivism has led us to a state of corruption of the government and the multinational corporations know this. They are interested in that because this facilitates their extraction of resources from the Indigenous territories and from the peoples in resistance. It is very sad to have to say these things about our country, but we have to tell the truth.

People sometimes say, oh no, we’re on the left, and capitalism is the problem. But my question is, which capitalism? Because many times they refer to the US, but I see that many of the mining companies are Chinese, or they come from Russia, and also from the US and other moneyed countries. So what capitalist are we really talking about? From my perspective, we have to say that there has to be social justice, transparency, and that we have to battle corruption so that the benefits, whatever they are, reach the people that really need them in the [foreign language], the campesinos, the Indigenous people that really need them.

Marc Steiner:  So I’d like to jump in for just a second. I’d like to hear what both Teresa and Pablo have to say, and jump in a bit to talk and respond to what Patricia was saying in terms of the left and right divide. It raises all kinds of questions about the power of capital across the globe, how it affects everything. No matter if it’s the left or the right in power, it seems to hit almost every country. So I’d like to explore that first. And let’s go, Teresa, why don’t you start?

Teresa Velásquez:  Well, yes, of course. I completely agree with Patricia when she says that the government of Correa followed the same pattern as the previous governments. Both neoliberal government and the so-called socialist government bet on mining as a tool of development, as a model of development to “reduce poverty.” And this puts at risk the watersheds and the territories of Indigenous people, Ecuadorians, and small farmers. And of course there’s some minor differences between the past or current neoliberal government right now and the Correas government. 

Both have opened the doors to foreign mining companies, but there is still a difference at the very beginning of Correa’s political project when it was still a broad-based coalition movement and people like Alberto Acosta were part of the government. We saw an openness to the demands of the anti-mining movement in the early years. For example, in April 2008, the constituent assembly admitted a decree that reverted those mining concessions that were granted without having had prior and informed consultation with communities, or that were located in an ecologically insensitive zone.

This was known as the Mining Mandate, and it should have been applied to the most contentious projects in the region such as the Quimsacocha Project, which is now known as the Loma Larga Project, Rio Blanco, which is also in Azuay, and other ones that were located in Intag and in the southeastern areas of the Amazon. But because Correa did bet on mining, he never implemented the Mining Mandate. This decree has been completely violated, and was substituted by a mining law that sought a developmental extraction with a little bit more participation from the state. So the government created a national mining company to seek greater participation in the profits generated by mining activities, rather than completely end or overturn those mining concessions that were causing so many problems.

Of course, for the anti-mining movement, the contradictions of the Correa government were obvious. On one hand, there was this government that was supposed to be a progressive government of the so-called “Citizens Revolution” leading an agenda for political and economic change. And while the constitution that came from this process did incorporate some important advances that support the Indigenous and environmental agendas, changes like recognizing Ecuador as a plurinational country reflected the longstanding demand of the Indigenous movement. The constitution also recognized the right of what is called the “good living” or “buen vivir” or the “sumak kawsay” as well as the rights of the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. They were also called the Rights of Nature. However, this did not fundamentally resolve the problem of the economic model. The economic model continued to be based on extractivism.

Marc Steiner:  That was really interesting. Now Pablo, could you talk briefly from your perspective about what’s happening in Bolivia?

Pablo Poveda: [Translated from Spanish] Yes, of course. This progressive government of the MAS in Bolivia emerged from a political crisis of neoliberalism, and, of course, accompanied by the social movement. The MAS party represents itself to the movements as a savior, the party that is going to overcome the extractive model of exporting raw materials of the Bolivian economy. In reality, what has happened is that it has made itself functional to capitalism so that the exploitation of natural resources continues. Of course, we have livable [inaudible] with regards to the prices of gas and other export products that permitted the government to somewhat avoid social conflicts. When the situation changed and the prices fell, the government showed itself as almost fascist, repressing the social movements.

This is the current situation: This government promised to overcome the extractive model of the economy and lead us to live well, and that there will be industrialization. However, economically, the results are terrible. The cycle of gas is coming to an end. Traditional mining is in a downturn. The total nationalization of mining was proposed, but that did not happen. There has been a proposal for two big projects. 

One is the extraction and industrialization of lithium by the government, and the other is the industrialization of iron with investments of millions of dollars. But they’re not profitable, and it has not happened. They say they’re progressive, but it is with capitalist content. When it comes to employment, 80% of the Bolivian population works in the informal economy, meaning they create their own jobs. And of that 80%, 87% are women. Therefore, we don’t see any results for the future. In fact, we see that extractivism is going to be intensified with the energy transition, which requires new materials to develop new technologies.

Marc Steiner:  Bret, can you pick up on that a little bit?

Bret Gustafson:  Yes, thanks Marc. And thanks, Pablo. That’s really eye-opening for us to hear, that in many ways the governments of the left, while they may have redistributed some of the money from extractivism in new ways, that the overall system does not really appear to have changed very much.

Marc Steiner:  So this has been a really important part of our discussion. It has unveiled a lot of contradictions, and they’re really important to explore even more deeply. I’d like all of you to comment on this. Pablo, then Patricia and Teresa come back in, explore what all this means. If there’s people listening to our podcast at the moment, many of them would be on the left. 

And I want to be clear about what we’re talking about. And we’re talking, it seems to me, in some ways about the huge power of capital across the globe, and even in Latin America, that affects the political life and the economy of those countries, no matter who’s in charge, no matter which party wins. So are we saying we’re not seeing any difference at all? I’d like to explore what that means, and I parse that out because it’s a very complicated and important subject.

Teresa Velásquez:  So it’s more about how do we re-envision socialism? How do we re-envision the left? And from the perspective of the anti-mining movement, what’s more important is that whoever’s elected is moving away from the extractive economy, and that includes oil, mining, gas, extraction of forest, and things like that. Their alternatives would be agroecology, community-based tourism, redistribution of land, redistribution of water. So some of those coincide with the socialist or progressive principles, but it’s not the left that we have seen necessarily in Ecuador and other parts of Latin America, because they’ve stayed within the same model of extractive development. 

So what people are asking and pushing for is a redistribution of resources and of power and a truly democratic system that’s going to consider the voices of communities, of women, of Indigenous peoples, of Afro-Ecuadorians; the people who really have borne those effects of the extractive industry and everything that’s come with it, the pollution and the struggles over territory and water.

Marc Steiner:  So Patricia, what do you think about this? Is there no difference at all between the left and the right and the governments that they run when it comes to extraction? Is it all the same?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] There is a difference in discourse. Some come with a beautiful way of speaking. So outside of the country, they are very much loved. But within the country they apply the same formula when it comes to extractivism, whether they are of the right wing or the left wing, they have all used the extractivism economic model, or they come with very strange proposals. But no government has known the state and the people that they govern. In Ecuador we are so diverse. They come to impose an ideology and a way of governing that does not correspond with what we are really living. And in the era of Correa there was an oil bonanza. They say right now we are in an oil bonanza, but they spend and spend and spend. And the whole time we are in crisis.

The issue of healthcare, for example, is in a total state of crisis in the country. Many people complain that they go to the hospitals and there is no medicine, there are no supplies to provide care. It’s a huge crisis. This is the basic level. In Ecuador, we don’t have universal social security. Only people who put in years of formal work have social security. Therefore, it’s a country that has been in an economic downturn, and it’s not doing well.

Yet, there is always talk about all the resources. Right now we’re talking about extractivism, and then there’s the environmental issue. All of the forests that we Indigenous people are protecting are now becoming a business; green business. And who’s receiving the benefits of that? It’s the government. And with a new discourse, oh no, we’re not going to destroy nature, but you have to be part of this green business. So for us, as Indigenous peoples, each millimeter of rights has been fought for with deaths, with struggle, with so much struggle. But I do believe that we have a holistic vision that could transform the vision of our country and make it more equitable with greater solidarity.

Bret Gustafson:  Thanks Patricia. And for those in our audience who may not be familiar with these names, Rafael Correa, who Patricia mentioned, was generally considered to be on the left, but as Patricia is saying, was fairly unfriendly to the positions of Indigenous peoples and others who were opposed to more extraction. The current president of Ecuador is a fellow named Guillermo Lasso, and he is definitively on the right, so things aren’t getting better there. Patricia, did you want to go on?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] That is not happening because the government of Correa, what it did is actually weakened the Indigenous peoples through personal attacks. They imprisoned various leaders, especially from Morona Santiago, especially from the mining areas. They were locked up as if they were the biggest crime busts. Two Indigenous leaders were put in maximum security prisons, and then the government tried to get all of the Indigenous people to speak in their favor. There could not be a critical voice without repression. We’re talking about a government that enjoyed credibility at the international level because it was said to be of the left, but it actually repressed Indigenous people. The Indigenous people were good as long as they supported the government. We were the bad ones because we were saying we did not want oil to be extracted. We wanted our rights and, therefore, we were the bad ones.

Under the current government, the government of Lasso, we have mining decrees and the expansion of extractivist economic activities. The government has not taken decisions to generate social justice in the country. There’s great amounts of crime. This government entered office with its hands tied with many promises, and it cannot act. Therefore, in these years we have lived government after government, the misery that has been generated towards Indigenous people. And overall, the persecution of Indigenous people has never ended since the colonial period. This is our reality.

Marc Steiner:  This has been really fascinating. So let me come back to you, Bret, for just a minute here, because in terms of what we’ve covered in this conversation so far, which always happens in great discussions, they don’t always go where you think they’re going to go. So let me ask you where you’d like to take this now.

Bret Gustafson:  Well, Marc, we’ve hit on a lot of points that we were hoping to. The big one being that this is the challenge of confronting the power of capital. And obviously, we see a lot of similarities between left and right governments when it comes to extractivism, even if there are some significant differences in government support for the poor, and we can’t forget about that. We’ve also talked about the corruption that comes with extractivism, as Patricia mentioned. 

Pablo draws our attention to the global crisis that capitalism appears to be in. So listening to Pablo, we have the potential for some revolutionary change, but as Pablo was saying, he doesn’t really see that we have revolutionary subjects anymore. But listening to Patricia, it does sound like Indigenous peoples have continued to struggle to carve out their own political spaces, some types of limited autonomy to chart their own futures. So we don’t want to be too pessimistic about the current moment.

Marc Steiner:  Now, you’re right, Bret. All we’re talking about here is the intense power of international capital. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. How do we build another future is the question. It’d be interesting from all of you, from your perspectives, from the places you live in, the places you struggle in: what do you think about what you’re fighting for and how different it is in terms of each of your struggles and how things could change? Could they be different? What would it look like?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] The situation is very complex. We have attended several United Nations conferences, for example, the Climate Conference. And since the Paris Conference, the ones that have doubled or tripled their participation in these spaces are the extractive companies like oil and mining. They try to prevent any forward movement in climate negotiations for the benefit of the environment. And that’s terrible, because we have very minimal influence in those conventions. Those companies also fund the meetings and they are in constant communications with governments. If things continue in this way, there really won’t be a real possibility of change.

We try to build up from the grassroots to propose different visions that are friendly to the environment and that have social justice at the center in terms of a relationship with nature that is completely different from the one that exists now. Sometimes people ask me why I participate in these conferences, and I say, really it’s to bother them, it’s to interrupt, to tell them that we are here, we’re not going to allow them to continue to work in this way as though we don’t exist. We’re going to continue to be in resistance. 

The solution really comes from strong communities that have autonomy, that have a vision of conservation. But that conservation must connect with the global level, with global benefits. The benefit of environmental conservation, but also equilibrium; eco-systemic balance. I dream. I belong to a nation of 1,350 people. That isn’t even as big as a school in a Western country. However, we are fighting so that our people can live well, that we can live sustainably, and that our vision can transform the vision of the Western world that is based on fossil fuels. You might say that this is a utopian vision, but this is our utopian vision.

Marc Steiner:  No, no, no. Patricia, that was good. It’s important. We have to have those utopian visions for the future, what the future could be like. Pablo, come in for a minute. And then Teresa, please jump in after that. Pablo, you as a Marxist and a Marxist activist and theoretician, how do you see these contradictions that Patricia raised? It’s really important to probe into that. I’m curious from your perspective on that, and then I want Teresa to round it out. Pablo.

Pablo Poveda: [Translated from Spanish] Yes, we are in a moment after the composition of capitalism. And if we do not overcome capitalism, I don’t think it’s a technology problem. Technology is good. We’re in the fourth industrial revolution, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for the hope of humanity. The problem isn’t that; the problems are the social relationships of production. These debates that are about the overcoming of extractivism are taking place within the frameworks of capitalism, and we have to overcome that. Unfortunately, these populist governments have taken backwards steps and have damaged the perception of the left and of Marxist movements at the international level. And they have been based in an ideological discourse.

It is about generating an enemy in whoever questions their proposals, and that leads to polarization, racism, confrontations between the communities, between the people in the countryside and the people in the city. It’s a very arduous task. And with regard to the social subject, the revolutionary subject, the Bolivian working class and mining and oil are well paid. These are not the same conditions that led to the revolution of 1952 in Bolivia. We should bring together the different sectors of society in the search to save the planet and really seek an energy transition that stops climate change, that overcomes capitalism, and brings together different parts of society. But I see it is very difficult to use this panorama, especially because after the pandemic, everybody wants to reactivate the economy, and they want to reactivate by exploiting even more nature and workers. It is a very hard and a very long task for a society that wants to liberate humanity from capitalism.

Bret Gustafson:  Those are really amazing observations. I just want to jump in quickly, Marc. As it often seems to happen, sometimes here in the US, we often look to Latin America for the solutions that we want. We want there to be a progressive transformation. I really appreciate it, Patricia, talking about the contradictions of the international climate negotiations. The fact that the wealthier countries are to blame. Maybe we shouldn’t always be looking for solutions in other countries here in the US. We need to also be a little more militant in our opposition to extractive economies that we live under and that our consumption maintains elsewhere.

Marc Steiner:  That’s a really strong point. Teresa, do you want to pick up on that for a moment?

Teresa Velásquez:  Yeah, I’m thinking of my students right now. We can educate them, help them make the connections around extractivism, water contamination, climate change, racism in both North and South America, and empower them to take action. From my perspective, I believe that this vision of the future also comes from Indigenous people in the US and in Latin America. So this vision is for a more sustainable future. It also has to be anti-racist. The future has to be anti-genocidal. It has to support the life of human beings and also non-human beings. 

And especially in Ecuador and in the US, it has to include the right to protest. The Ecuadorian constitution protects the right to protest, but despite that, we see how the most visible leaders are insulted and criminalized. So this future also has to include the right to protest and the right to have a much more profound democracy and support for more sustainable projects like agroecology, farming, community-based tourism, and other economic priorities that have been put forward by the Indigenous movements in both North and South America.

Marc Steiner:  Let me jump in for a second here. A little sidebar that I was just thinking about and listening to what everybody was saying when we think about where the future might take us and you all think it might take us. I realize under my shirt is a Che Guevara shirt I’m wearing today. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution was, in some ways, a really different time, a different era. It was many years back, it was in my youth. I’m 76 now, so it’s a different time. So to pick up on that, and Bret please jump in here, I want to jump in and talk about where you all think the future will take us now. Where would it take us? How can we get there? What does it look like?

Bret Gustafson:  Those are tough questions, Marc. I wish I had the answer to that myself because you’re right, it is a different generation, and now we’re seeing more militants and more aggression from the right wing. And it seems like in some ways, the left is not sure what direction to go in. And there’s some, at least in the Latin American context, there’s a tension between an older school of left thought and newer concerns largely tied to the environment. And our guests have all made some great points. We want a future that’s not racist. We want a more egalitarian future. We want a future that’s not about ecological destruction. How do we get there? That’s a question that I don’t think I have an easy answer for.

Marc Steiner:  I don’t think any of us do at the moment.

Bret Gustafson:  I know that it’s going to take organization. I know that it’s going to take a shift. I see a lot of hope in young people in the working class in the US. I see a lot of hope in the connections being made between anti-racist movements and environmental movements. No, it’s not the big green movements that are now on center stage. We see all kinds of movements on the front lines all over our country, connections between the movement for the climate, movements against police violence. This is definitely the key way forward, making more connections between different kinds of movements.

Marc Steiner:  I agree. The motions internationally and nationally here in the US are just erupting, and how they will turn out and how they will mold, what they’ll say to the future, is something we’re going to see develop. We just don’t know. But it looks good.

Bret Gustafson:  And Patricia wanted to say something else, Patricia?

Patricia Gualinga:  [Translated from Kichwa] I don’t know if this is possible, but we have to keep trying because we can’t just keep simply accepting what they’re doing. If we talk about progressive governments, Lula just came into power in Brazil. We’re very happy about this because we did not want Bolsonaro by any means. And Pedro won the presidency in Colombia, and we are also happy about that because, for the same reason, we did not want the other candidate.

These governments have seen what happens when you do the wrong things. Let’s hope that they do the right things. In their hands is the task to look for transformations in these countries, to respect rights, to make the changes that people want. In their hands is the possibility that the left can maintain a bit of dignity, and we keep looking for solutions. I and my people are in resistance because we are sure that in our context we can look for those alternatives. We can seek those sustainable approaches because we are so few. But if we’re talking at the global level, we’re talking about the global economy, then the people with the money have to invest in things that do not continue on this path of destruction.

Marc Steiner:  Bret.

Bret Gustafson: That’s great. Picking up on that, it’s clear that it’s going to take more organization, more mobilization, more reflection, more understanding of what’s happening at different levels. And at the end of the day, it’s going to take putting pressure on governments and putting pressure on industries. I don’t think there’s any other way around it.

[Long pause]

Marc Steiner:  So we’re adding this addendum to our conversation because, Bret, a lot has happened since our recording and you’ve been following this fairly closely. So why don’t you update us on what’s happened since we recorded this earlier conversation.

Bret Gustafson:  Yeah, Marc. That’s right. In Ecuador, things have gotten a little bit disturbing. The Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, CONAIE, has demanded the resignation of President Guillermo Lasso. He’s actually in the process of potentially undergoing an impeachment in the Congress. In addition, sadly, an Ecuadorian Cofan Indigenous leader named Eduardo Mendua was assassinated in February. Eduardo was the director of the international relations arm of the National Indigenous Movement CONAIE. He was also an outspoken opponent of continued oil development in his territory. Some observers suspect that conflicts tied to oil drilling and, potentially, to the state oil company, led to his killing.

So very troubling indeed. In Bolivia, the new MAS government led by Luis Arce continues to confront right-wing efforts to destabilize the government. Plans to develop lithium and steel are still at the forefront of government visions of the future. But because natural gas exports are declining, that means less revenues coming into the country. The international reserves, which were once the envy of Latin America, have dwindled. And to stave off a potential currency crisis, Arce’s government has moved to start buying more gold from gold miners in Bolivia. Meaning, of course, that, once again, the dependence on extractivism, particularly in the Amazon region of the country, continues.

Marc Steiner:  This has been a fascinating discussion. It really has been. We were looking at extractivism, but we end up plumbing the depths of what our political future might be in Latin America and here. And it’s really important and wonderful. And what you’ve added to this conversation at the end means we have to take a deeper look into this and take another journey with these guests, and maybe some other guests, to look at where the future may take us and what’s actually happening on the ground. It’s really important, because what happens in Latin America affects policies, lives, and the world we live in. They can’t be separated. Never have been.

Bret Gustafson:  That’s right, Marc. I agree. Thanks so much for letting me join you today.

Marc Steiner:  And so as we go out, I do want to thank all of our guests today: Patricia Gualinga from Ecuador who joined us. Teresa Velásquez, who’s a professor of Anthropology at Cal State University in San Bernardino. And from Bolivia, Pablo Poveda Avila, who’s a radical economist, working with a think tank, the Center for Studies of Labor and Agrarian Development. Of course, Bret Gustafson, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

230 bright blue dots are plotted on an official gray map plainly labeled “Michigan PFAS Sites.” Innocuous in appearance, the majority of dots designate military bases, airports, and landfills, where PFAS—per- or polyfluorinated substances, often referred to as “forever chemicals,” which are found in fire retardants, lubricants, and coatings like Scotchgard™ and Teflon™—are used, or were dumped. The contaminants have become somewhat better known to Americans through the 2019 Hollywood film Dark Waters. These blue dots are markers of tragedy; sites of either profound ignorance or nihilistic callousness. One of them is less than two miles from Mary Burks’ home on the south side of Pellston, Michigan. 

I spoke with Mary in September 2022. An elder of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Mary was diagnosed in December 2021 with stage 4 liver cancer, a disease associated with PFAS contamination. By January it had metastasized to her lungs and she was told she had three months to live. Her blue dot was the Pellston Regional Airport, where firefighting foams chock full of PFAS chemicals were routinely used. No one’s sure how long the airport used these chemicals, but it was long enough to contaminate Mary’s own well a couple of miles away, and the wells of both her sisters, Shirley and Alice. Shirley’s husband dug the well 84 feet down—extra deep “because he didn’t want to run into anything down there.” He died of leukemia in recent years, a disease which is also associated with PFAS contamination.

PFAS were first detected in Pellston in early 2020 at the tribe’s Head Start center, one block over from Mary’s house. High school students, including Shirley’s own granddaughter, conducted the testing with Fresh Water Futures, a nonprofit that catalyzes community efforts to safeguard the waters of the Great Lakes. “I don’t know why Katy’s class decided to check it,” Shirley said. “At first they didn’t find anything, but the class wanted to go a little bit farther and see what happens next, and that’s when they found the PFAS. You know, you just wonder how long this has been going on, probably a long time, because no one thought to check it.”

Mary had come back to Emmet County in 2004 to be with her extended family after putting in 30 years at Stroh’s Brewery in Detroit. “I’ve had a good life, I went to a lot of dances, a lot of powwows, I just had a wonderful life,” she said. “I worked all the time, but I had a good time with my sisters especially. I told my great grandson, who loves me, ‘Don’t feel bad for me. Think of me as finally being able to rest.’”

As we spoke about her life, there were plenty of hearty laughs, but also a few moments when her words would wither to ash on her tongue and her eyes would drain of all sparkle. When I asked her to describe the pain, she said only, “It’s chronic.” About receiving her diagnosis, she remarked, “I think I took it okay, considering, but it’s never good news to get. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t want to go, but we all have to, so get your mind fixed for it,’ and that’s basically what I did.” 

Mary’s eldest daughter, Andrea Pierce, thanked her mother for outliving her prognosis by at least six months. “My mother is ‘Odawa strong,’” she said. But a few moments later, Mary said, “I’m getting weaker and weaker. Some days I can’t get out from under the blanket [because] it’s so heavy.” 

The scourge of fatal cancer has run rampant through Mary’s community. Mary, her brother-in-law, and their cousins, two brothers who lived on Shirley’s block, also had fatal cancers. Their neighbor across the street was only 54 when they died of cancer, and Roseanne, another neighbor down the block, died of lung cancer. Pelston’s population is only 755; similarly, tribal members living in Emmet County number only in the hundreds, and every loss is deeply felt.

“It’s like in the war-torn countries that have all the land mines,” said Mary’s younger daughter, Marisa Graves, who left her husband behind in the Northwest to be her mother’s everyday caretaker. “You can see the people of all ages with their limbs that have been blown off. And most of them don’t even have a prosthesis, or they have homemade crutches of sticks and things… that’s going to be our commonplace here.” 

In 2020, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) issued rules for the maximum limit of seven PFAS contaminants in our drinking water. In 2023, the EPA expanded those rules, setting the maximum limits at 4 parts per trillion. These rules apply to 2,700 public drinking water systems—but private drinking water wells and systems are not regulated. The drinking water in Mary’s house was filtered by under-the-sink filters provided by Emmet County, but their daily shower is taken in contaminated water. “I was a little freaked out when I first got here, I was thinking, yikes, it could be me next. This could be a thing that I go through, and I’m watching her, and I’m watching my future,” Graves said.

For four consecutive years, Jannan Cornstalk, a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, has coordinated the Water Is Life Festival in Mackinaw City, held on Labor Day weekend. The annual event is timed to attract some of the 26,000 or so bridge-walkers who flood into the tourist town every year to traverse the five-mile suspension bridge that connects the state’s upper and lower peninsulas. The free outdoor festival has been devoted to educating the public about the imminent hazard to the Great Lakes posed by the continued operation of Enbridge Corporation’s 69-year-old twin pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac, and the existential threat to the 12 “fishing tribes,” including Cornstalk’s own.

But lately, Cornstalk, who is based in Petoskey, had been hearing about a spate of serious cancer diagnoses, illnesses, and deaths of tribal members living in nearby Pellston. She began wondering if this epidemic could be related to the discovery of PFAS contamination, traced back to the Pellston Regional Airport, in homeowners’ private wells. 

Realizing the community had more questions than answers, Cornstalk, and the festival’s steering committee, changed their focus. The 2022 festival would be devoted to educating themselves and attendees about the threat to clean water in Michigan posed by PFAS. A panel of experts and impacted community members (which by virtue of necessity have become overlapping categories) presented information and insights at the 2022 festival.

“PFAS is a family of chemicals that have been in use since around 1940, initially developed for industrial processes like water repellents, stain resistance, heat resistance and lubrication, and also consumer products such as fireproofing, GORE-TEX products, shoes, fabrics, food containers, Teflon cookware and food wrappers,” Charlie Schlinger, a Traverse City-based engineer and scientist, said at the festival. “PFAS compounds… tend to last in your body and in the environment for a very long time, [and] the health impacts are not very well understood.”

“Industries that create [PFAS compounds] undermined the regulatory agency and regulatory processes that otherwise would have been in place to protect the public from these chemicals, so the EPA was hamstrung for decades, and did little to protect against PFAS,” Schlinger continued. “They are taking more action recently in the past few years but in the meantime it’s been over 70 years since these compounds were introduced, and there’s been widespread use around the globe.”

In July 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine publicly urged doctors to pursue testing for their patients. But insurance won’t pay, the test is absurdly costly, and polluter pay laws—though introduced on several occasions by Sen. Jeff Irwin of Ann Arbor—have not yet advanced in the Michigan legislature. “I would like more testing,” said Pierce, who is both chair and founder of the Anishinaabe caucus of the Democratic Party. “I think [Mary] has PFAS poisoning because we’re so close to the contamination side, and it’s her liver. But the blood testing costs so much and I don’t know if we’d be able to afford it.”

By Irwin’s own admission, because of the strictures of what was possible and not possible as a member of the minority party, some of his past legislative initiatives have been “nibbling around the edges” of protections against chemical contamination. But now that the Democrats have regained control of the legislature for the first time in 40 years, that will most certainly change. Irwin credited Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer with creating a “maximum contamination limit” for PFAS chemicals to try and protect the health of Michigan residents, but thinks those rules could be tighter. “The two biggest things that were left on the cutting room floor were a more cumulative sense of exposure and a child receptor rule, rules that are really focused on protecting the most vulnerable people—little people, children,” he said.

Sandy Wynn-Stelt, of the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network, has had her life ravaged by PFAS contamination. A former therapist turned full-time advocate, she spoke at the Water is Life Festival in 2022. After living in the area for over 20 years, her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2016, and died three weeks later. “It was devastating to me,” she said. “It was like losing a limb. I still miss him every day.” 

The following year, the Department of Environmental Quality [DEQ] came and asked if they could test her groundwater because they thought that there may be contamination. “It was the first time I heard of PFAS,” she said at the festival. “They tested my water, and three weeks later they had a team come to my house to give me results. If you’ve ever worked in government you know that if there’s a team coming to your house, it’s not to deliver good news. It wasn’t the Publishers Clearinghouse. My well tested at 24,000 parts per trillion. The EPA guidelines at that time were 70 parts per trillion, and my well was tested over and over, and it tested as high as 80,000 parts per trillion.”

According to Wynn-Stelt, the Christmas tree farm that they lived across the street from had been a dump site for Wolverine Worldwide, a global footwear company based in Michigan. “They had dumped tannery waste throughout the ’70s there by the truckload, and contaminated 28 feet deep and about 30 acres wide,” she said. “That contaminated the groundwater, which spread 25 square miles, and it’s heading to the Grand River, and, as we know, the Grand River heads to Lake Michigan.” 

She described how, concerned for her health, she got her blood tested for PFAS chemicals. The results were shocking: 5,000,000 parts per trillion, more than 750 times the national average. Her battle with thyroid cancer in 2000, initially thought to be an anomaly, suddenly made sense. “You know, I wish I could say that my story was the worst, but you’re going to hear other stories that are just like this,” she said. “So if I have any word of advice for people it would be—don’t assume your drinking water is safe.”

Tobyn McNaughton, a mother who lives in Belmont, also spoke at the Water is Life Festival in 2022. Everyone in her family—herself, her husband, and her children—has experienced symptoms and complications from exposure to high levels of PFAS compounds. “Wolverine Worldwide illegally dumped dangerous forever chemicals that leached into our groundwater, into our drinking water,” she said at the festival. According to McNaughton, Wolverine Worldwide downplayed the severity of the contamination to the DEQ, resulting in delayed testing of the community’s groundwater and extra months of unnecessary exposure to the chemicals. “Instead of our water being tested in April 2017, we were not made aware until August 2017,” she said. “[The water] was not actually tested until September.”

The family has been devastated by the effects of the poisoned water. “There are no medications, no procedures to safely remove these chemicals, only time, and that is only what is in our blood. We can never measure what is stored in our tissues or organs,” she said. “We can’t escape PFAS.”

At the festival, Pierce heard the speakers from Rockford/Belmont say how they got whole-house filters, and noted the disparity in her county’s response to the crisis. “I don’t see any signs out there saying ‘no fishing in the Maple River because it’s been contaminated.’ I talked to an Emmet County Commissioner about PFAS at a meeting [in August 2022], and I said, ‘What in the world lets you guys okay this, and give the people only one under-the-counter water filter to use, and that’s the only thing they have? Why can’t you give them a whole-house filter?’ He said, ‘Well, you know, the government is slow,’ and I said, ‘Well, you know my mother’s dying, right?’”

Later, at her mother’s home, Pierce elaborated. “The under-the-counter filters that Emmet County gave us only work on the cold water in the kitchen sink,” she said. “So when you wash your dishes, everyone’s washing with hot water. My mother is fighting with everything she’s got, she’s not letting anything go, but she’s being stolen from us.”

Calling over from her lounger, Mary said her piece. “Test before you do this stuff, you’re causing all these people all this intense pain. It would be different if you could take an antibiotic and be rid of it, but you can’t. It’s going to take you down. Just one side of town we don’t know how many of us are all going to be sick, and how far back and if these kids could get it from being up here [for] so many years… I might’ve lived another 10, 20 years. Longevity is in my family.”

“The whole town needs full filters in every building, not one sink in the whole house. You can’t eat your vegetables watered with PFAS,” Mary continued. “Our trees are all dying; when the guy at the hardware store, Andrea said she wanted one for the bathroom so I could brush my teeth, and he said, ‘You don’t need it for your teeth. Just spit it out. Do you tell your family that, just spit it out?’”

Three days after I visited with Mary Angela Burks and her family, on September 7, 2022, she “walked on”.

This story originally appeared in Richochet on May 2, 2023, and is shared with permission. This article is originally co-published with Indiginews Media, and can be read on their site as well.

I blew a tire on my Jeep driving the rough roads up to visit the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory back in late March. With no cell service in the area, I was surrounded by forest and mountains a 45-minute drive away from any main roads.

I knew I wouldn’t be stranded there, thanks to the Coastal Gas Link security truck that had been following me ever since I left the main roads. Sure enough, a man wearing a balaclava and dressed in dark, navy-coloured clothing reading “security,” pulled up a few metres behind me. For a second I felt afraid — an Indigenous woman, alone, in a remote area parallel to the murderous Highway of Tears — anything could happen. This man had swerved dangerously towards me, almost running me off the road, about 15 minutes earlier when I attempted to pass his extremely slow-moving vehicle.

But I calmed myself when I thought of the near-constant industry traffic that travels these roads. No one could hurt me and attempt to hide it that fast, or so I prayed.

I got out of my Jeep to assess the damage and saw my tire deflated almost to the ground. The idea of asking the CGL security guard for help, who was staring me down from the inside of his truck, filled me with dread. But I gathered the nerve to approach him.

“Hi, look, I’ve got a flat. Can you please help?” I asked, looking into the two slits of eyes squinting at me through his mask. He was probably assessing who I was and what I was doing there — and if I was a protestor.

“I’m a journalist. And I’m headed up to Unis’tot’en,” I said.

He then nodded and rolled down his window.

“I’ll come take a look,” he said flatly, calling on his radio to a colleague.

CGL keeps tabs on everything that goes on in the area. After all, it’s the contentious territory where Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and land defenders have been opposing a multi-billion dollar liquified natural gas pipeline for the last several years — where multiple, violent police raids and arrests have made headlines in Canada and around the world. And, where the RCMP are continually patrolling to enforce a Supreme Court injunction obtained by CGL to stop anyone attempting to impede the pipeline’s construction.

His colleague soon pulled up, in another white pickup truck, CGL’s standard vehicles, and the two attempted to remove my tire and put on the spare. They didn’t have the right tools, so his colleague offered to drive me the rest of the way to Unis’tot’en.

Just then, another white pickup truck came around the corner. The driver started to slow down. I saw it was an RCMP officer — when the CGL security waved them off (signalling it was ok and I was not impeding anything) the cop waved back, grinning ear to ear. I thought it was strange the two had such a friendly rapport, but they are working together to keep order (and suppress dissent) along these isolated roads.

What made me shiver was the thought of these lands being unjustly controlled — it was just like the old days, when the colonizers first arrived. They showed up, herded our people onto tracks of land called reserves, then stole the land and did what they wanted with it. If any Indigenous person stood in their way, they were arrested and jailed.

I snapped back to the present day, but realized the forced, militarized colonization of Indigenous lands and people is still alive and well. And what a shuttering, sad situation, given we are supposedly in an era of reconciliation.

The security worker dropped me off at the end of the driveway and I walked to the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre. I was greeted with a smile and inquiry from Dr. Karla Tait, a Wet’suwet’en matriarch and program director at the centre. She’d been expecting me.

“Brandi, I was worried about you. Where is your car? What happened?”

I explained to her how I’d popped my tire and hitched a ride with CGL security. She asked a male supporter who lives at the centre to take a Unis’tot’en truck to put on my spare.

It was near dark by the time we returned. I was served steaming nettle tea, harvested from the yintah (Wet’suwet’en for land) — it’s loaded with iron, antioxidants and just overall good for you.

It was quiet at the centre as Tait’s nine-year-old daughter Oyate and Tait’s mother Helen Mitchell, who also lives there, were out visiting family in the Wiset reserve for the weekend. Freda Huson, another matriarch, and Tait’s aunt, who started the healing centre about a decade ago, was visiting her daughter and new twin grandchildren.

I asked Tait how she’s been doing since the drilling under Wedzin’ Kwa started.

Wedzin’ Kwa is the sacred river system parallel to the Unis’tot’en Healing Centre and the community’s sole source of drinking water. It’s the river the Unis’tot’en matriarchs and other land defenders have battled so hard to protect from the pipeline. Tait, her mother and Huson have all been arrested for standing in its way.

“Honestly,” she sighs, then adjusts her eyeglasses. “It’s really hard to confront that reality. And I think we’ve been focused on maintaining our space and trying to maintain our wellness and our health. And realizing the vision of this space and the work we want to do here. So, if anything, I’ve probably been trying to avoid a lot of updates [about the drilling] and following in depth because it’s distressing and hard to confront.”

Earlier that morning, Tait took me on a tour of the healing centre grounds. We walked a narrow path through the snow to the banks of Wedzin’ Kwa and drank the ice-cold fresh water. Tait, Freda and others believe the water has healing properties because it is uncontaminated and carries essential minerals from the glaciers.

While standing on the rocky shoreline, Tait fixed her gaze on a truck crossing a bridge that connects Unis’tot’en territory to Gidimt’en, another Wet’suwet’en clan. The truck stops alongside a CGL security truck that’s parked at the end of the bridge to the south, facing Unis’tot’en, 24/7. Tait looks annoyed.

“We deserve to exist here. We deserve to be undisturbed and at peace and to live as our ancestors did and to protect what’s left for future generations,” she said, while shaking her head in frustration.

“As Indigenous people, when our rights are eroded in this way, over what are our sacred responsibilities to protect and steward our territory, we need to stand together on those things and push for justice.”

She kneels on the rocky shoreline, cups her hand, and sips more from Wedzin’ Kwa. A peaceful expression appears across her face.

Tait usually spends her days applying for grants, developing Indigenous-based counselling, land therapy programs, and helps to keep the centre running. She wants more community members to come to Unis’tot’en to utilize the healing sessions, but she knows there are barriers.

“People are reluctant to send folks to our space on the land to heal when they know the police are going to come and harass and re-traumatize folks. That we’re going to be watched by CGL security, which is disgusting and abhorrent.”

The truck parked across the bridge is aimed toward the healing centre. It can be seen through a break in the trees. Several months ago the matriarchs put up a few tarps to block its view. Sometimes the wind blows them away.

“It’s a huge problem. And it doesn’t feel good for me knowing whenever my daughter goes outside to play, somebody’s probably watching, right? So, I keep very close tabs on her,” Tait said.

When young mothers with children fleeing domestic violence or individuals struggling with trauma come to stay at Unis’tot’en, the staff let them know they’re being surveilled.

“And there’s no one to hold them (CGL) accountable because the bodies that are supposed to protect us, we’re never designed to protect us in the first place,” said Tait, adding that in the past couple of months, they’ve noticed multiple drones in the sky surrounding the healing center at night.

Tait gifted Oyate a telescope on her ninth birthday recently.

“We’re trying to go stargazing at night and are surrounded by drones, so, It’s really sad and laughable in some ways. Like some nights we’ll go and see if it’s a good night to see the moon and it’s like, oh, well the brightest objects in the sky right now (are the drones).”

I asked to spend the night in the guest quarters of the healing center as I wanted to see the drones for myself. Around 9 p.m., Tait and I went outside.

It used to be pitch black out at night other than the stars and moon in the sky — now a massive dome of unnatural light illuminates the horizon. It’s from the drill zone.

“There’s constant noise (from the drill), there’s constant light,” shrugged Tait. “We used to have perfect starry lights out here with zero light pollution, now look at it. And we have security parked aiming their headlights at our center much of the time.”

This night was foggy but the moon and stars were still visible. Within 15 minutes Tait found a drone far off in the sky and then another not long afterward. I looked through the telescope and saw a small, multi-coloured object moving around.

“That’s it. That’s one of them,” said Tait.

Again, I was shocked. That this was happening in so-called Canada in 2023. That unarmed, peaceful Indigenous citizens were being stalked and surveilled in their own lands.

After leaving Unis’tot’en, I inquired with CGL as to if it was operating drones to spy on Unis’tot’en, which it denied. The RCMP did admit to using drones, but only during daylight hours and during active police enforcement.

Tait, meanwhile, is saddened her daughter is being raised under dystopian conditions, but believes Oyate will grow to be strong, understand her rights and powerfully fulfill her role as a future matriarch.

“It feels like a sacred and important responsibility (raising Oyate). But also, I’m glad that this veil of equality and justice and fairness in Canada has never been in front of her eyes, clouding her perceptions about the reality that we live in as Indigenous people,” she said.

“She’s so sharp and she sees it, right? And I think about the way that she’ll be able to walk and work to protect the land as she grows up, like with that clarity from the start. We’re going to continue and this is not going to shake us from our course.”

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sept. 13, 2022. It is shared here under a Creative Commons license.

Indigenous water defenders and their allies on Tuesday celebrated a Minnesota court ruling protecting a Line 3 protest camp from illegal government repression.

Hubbard County District Judge Jana Austad issued a ruling shielding the Indigenous-led Giniw Collective’s Camp Namewag—where opponents organize resistance to Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline—from local law enforcement’s unlawful blockades and harassment.

The ruling follows months of litigation on behalf of Indigenous water protectors, whose legal team last year secured a temporary restraining order issued by Austad against Hubbard County, Sheriff Cory Aukes, and the local land commissioner for illegally blocking access to Camp Namewag.

“Today David beat Goliath in a legal victory for people protecting the climate from rapacious corporate destruction,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law & Litigation at the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said in a statement.

“The outrageous blockade and repression of an Indigenous-led water protector camp were fueled by massive sums of money flowing from the Enbridge corporation to the sheriff’s department as it acted against water protectors challenging Enbridge’s destruction of Native lands,” she added.

Indigenous activist and Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, who is a plaintiff in the case, said that “15 months ago, I was woken up at 6:00 am and walked down my driveway to a grinning sheriff holding a notice to vacate my yearslong home.”

“That day turned into 50 squad cars on a dirt road and a riot line blocking my driveway,” she recalled. “Twelve people—guests from all over who came to protect the rivers and wild rice from Line 3 tar sands—were arrested and thrown into the dirt.”

Houska continued:

Today’s ruling is a testament to the lengths Hubbard County was willing to go to criminalize and harass Native women, land defenders, and anyone associated with us—spending unknown amounts of taxpayer dollars and countless hours trying to convince the court that the driveway to Namewag camp wasn’t a driveway. It’s also a testament to steadfast commitment to resisting oppression. This is a piece in the long game and we aren’t afraid. We haven’t forgotten the harms to us and the harms to the Earth. Onward.

Winona LaDuke, co-founder and executive director of Honor the Earth and a former Green Party vice presidential candidate, stated that “we are grateful to Judge Austad for recognizing how Hubbard County exceeded its authority and violated our rights.”

“Today’s ruling shows that Hubbard County cannot repress Native people for the benefit of Enbridge by circumventing the law,” she added. “This is also an important victory for all people of the North reinforcing that a repressive police force should not be able to stop you from accessing your land upon which you hunt or live.”

EarthRights general counsel Marco Simons asserted that “the court’s ruling is a major rebuke to police efforts to unlawfully target water protectors and to interfere with their activities protesting the Line 3 pipeline.”

“Blocking access to the Namewag camp exemplifies a pattern of unlawful and discriminatory police conduct incentivized by an Enbridge-funded account from which the police can seek reimbursement for Line 3-related activities,” he continued.

“Police forces should protect the public interest, not private companies,” Simons added. “Cases like this highlight the dangers of allowing the police to act as a private security arm for pipeline companies.”

Indigenous people have long stressed the unspeakable horrors of residential (boarding) schools in North America. Last year, those horrors were made inescapably real for many when mass graves were unearthed at multiple school locations in Canada. Since then, the fight to confront the colonial and genocidal function of these schools has ramped up, and that fight reached a new height when a delegation of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders met with Pope Francis at the Vatican—a meeting that was followed by a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s role in driving the residential school system. In this installment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc welcomes back journalist Brandi Morin, who was at the Vatican for last month’s historic meeting, to discuss the ways that the colonial violence embodied in residential schools lives on today.

Brandi Morin is an award-winning French/Cree/Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets, including Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, The National Observer, The New York Times, Vice Canada, and CBC Indigenous. Read Morin’s latest reporting here. 

Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday on TRNN, and subscribe to the TRNN YouTube channel for video versions of The Marc Steiner Show podcast.

Pre-Production/Studio: Adam Coley

Post-Production: Stephen Frank, Adam Coley

TRANSCRIPT

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, great to have you all with us once again.

We are joined once again by Brandi Morin, who’s a leading Canadian journalist of Cree, Iroquois, and French descent, who covers with in-depth analysis the social, political, cultural life, and struggles of Indigenous peoples in Canada. She’s written a lot for Al Jazeera. A number of series on Al Jazeera, she’s been covering the Pope’s trip to Rome, which we’ll be talking about, apologizing for the past crimes against Indian people, to unearthing the heart-rendering murders and colonial story of Canadian boarding schools, where Indian children went from the 1870s to the 1990s.

We’ll explore the deep connection there is today between the destruction of Indigenous culture, these boarding schools, what the Pope did, to the missing and murdered among Native women that takes place in Canada, like it does here in the United States. Once again, Brandi, welcome. Good to have you with us, really good to have you with us.

Brandi Morin: Tânisi [“hello” in Plains Cree], Marc, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marc Steiner: I’m glad you could make the time. I know you’re covering 17 things at once.

Brandi Morin: I love it though.

Marc Steiner: Wouldn’t have it any other way. So, let’s start with the trip to Rome and what that was about, and the story also in that of Lorelei Williams, the woman that you centered in one of your stories around that trip to Rome. So, take us back a bit, A, how you got there, and what this was? What’s the history of this?

Brandi Morin: Yeah. So, this was a historic meeting between Pope Francis and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit delegates from so-called Canada. The Pope had invited them to talk about the evils of the residential school system, in which the Catholic role played a huge role. They ran close to 70% of the Indian residential schools in Canada, and we know that Indigenous children were kidnapped, stolen from their families, and forced to attend these assimilative schools, where most often they experience severe neglect and sexual, emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, and were punished for speaking their languages, and just degraded as children in every way. Thousands of them didn’t make it out alive.

The world was shocked last summer when some of the graves of our children began to be unearthed. It started in Kamloops, BC where 215 unmarked graves were found. Then it started snowballing across the country where these former residential schools were, where these graves are being discovered. So, there was a lot of grieving, a lot of pain.

So, there was the Anglican Church, the Prosperian Churches that were involved in running these schools, but the Catholic Church administered the majority of them and funded by the federal government, they were the only church that still hadn’t apologized. The survivors and families of survivors have advocated for years for an apology from the head of the Church, which was the Pope. So, the Pope invited this delegation to Rome, and I was privileged to be able to go along and document these historic meetings for Al Jazeera English in late March and early April. It was a pretty incredible experience. It was a devastating, emotional rollercoaster of a ride.

Marc Steiner: I was thinking, there’s a couple of things that popped through my head as you were speaking, but let me focus in. One of the stories you did, at the center of this story was this woman Lorelei Williams. There’s this amazing cape that she is wearing, this red cape. She talked about her mother, who lived through the schools, and her father, who was a famous artist who lived through the schools, and how her mother became an alcoholic. You can tell her story more, but it just was so moving. She said, “I 100% feel like the government killed her. I even wanted to sue them. The government has killed all our people that have died before their time. My mother was trying to numb that pain, that’s what killed her. The colonizers wanted to wipe our people off our lands.” So, talk about her, and your interaction with her, what you saw in her, and what her story is, and how is kind of emblematic of the literal genocide motor against Indigenous people in Canada?

Brandi Morin: Absolutely. Literal genocide, yes. So, I’ve known Lorelei for a number of years, Lorelei Williams. She’s an Indigenous advocate. She’s an advocate for Indigenous justice as well for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. So, she had found out about this meeting happening in Rome, and she told me she knew she just had to be there. Both of her parents attended residential schools, both of them are now deceased. So what she did was she paid her own way there. She wasn’t a part of the official delegation.

I wanted to connect with her right away, so we decided to go to the home of the gladiators, to the Coliseum one evening. She brought this stunning silk cape that is in honoring of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. She wore it there at the Coliseum, and the sun was setting. She started to tell me the story of how her parents survived these houses of horrors, and how her mother experienced sexual abuse, and physical abuse, and emotional, everything that you can imagine, and how her mother dealt with that pain. She became an alcoholic, and she literally drank herself to death. She went into liver failure, and her father died young, too. It was absolutely heartbreaking. But she was there not only for her parents, but to bring awareness to this crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that is a symptom of colonization, that is a remnant of the violence of these residential school systems.

Our women are being stolen like our children were stolen. Our women are being targeted for violence just like our children were targeted for violence. This hasn’t stopped, it’s ongoing today. So, she wanted to bring that urgent message to Pope Francis, and hoped that it would get out just by her being there, even though she wasn’t a part of the delegation.

Marc Steiner: Do you think the Pope heard her?

Brandi Morin: I think so. I know that the delegates brought up a number of these concerns with the Pope in their private meetings with him. Her presence was very prominent there in Rome. She went to St. Peter’s Basilica and sang there and danced there, and supported the survivors, walked with the survivors. So, hopefully the Pope became aware or is aware of these continuing genocides.

Marc Steiner: There’s so many other places that we could take these conversations because of all you’ve been writing about and all you experienced with the Pope, also your stories about the missing and murdered women that continues to this day. I want to explore with you just for a moment these connections, what they mean. I think people don’t… In Canada there’s this Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the United States has failed to do at all yet, to even take that step.

But the whole reality of, what you can describe, thousands of Indigenous children, of Native children who were killed, died in those boarding schools, buried in unmarked graves, across Canada. To me, as I read about it, I remember I did a story about the men’s camps in the United States years back with the same thing that’s happening, where all these mostly white men working on the oil pipelines ended up raping and attacking Indian women across the country. The same thing happens in Canada. There’s a horrendous connection, for me anyway, between those two that’s an arc, that it’s connected. I’m wondering if you could explore that for a bit, and also give people watching, listening, the sense of what happened in those boarding schools and the stories that came out of there?

Brandi Morin: Yeah. So, when the European colonizers first arrived on Turtle Island, they had an agenda to mine the gold, to extract the resources, and to steal the land. It brought violence. That violence was also projected onto the people of the land, the Indigenous people, and especially the Indigenous women. So, any violence against our Mother Earth, it transcribes onto violence against our mothers, against our daughters, against our sisters. So, that always has gone hand in hand.

Our mothers are the life givers, the life givers to our children. Our children were targeted by these colonizers who wanted to take control, who wanted to take over these lands that our people have called [home for] millennia. They started to kill us off, and then they targeted the children to attempt to assimilate them because our ways were considered savage, our ways were considered pagan and evil. They tried to indoctrinate Indigenous children into their culture and their ways, and they did it by force.

It all translates to what’s happening today. The residential school era did not end. We still have thousands and thousands of Indigenous children that are forcibly removed from their homes today, because they are overrepresented in the child welfare system. Because our families are reeling from the effects of colonization, from the effects of the abuses of these boarding schools, and not given the resources or the opportunities to heal. Our children are being taken continuously. Our children make up the majority of children in the child welfare system in Canada. It’s a complete money maker.

And the extractive industry is ongoing. Canada is built on industry. It is a mining nation, and it’s continuing to perpetuate that violence against our people. Our people are still being removed from their lands. Our people are still being targeted for violence. And we know that the violence that industry brings, whether it’s through man camps or whether it’s through the violation of Indigenous rights, that our women are being raped and murdered. Everything is connected. The thing is, this isn’t something of the past. This is something that is continuous, that is ongoing.

Even in the United States, these borders were created by the colonizers, but the effects go all the way down the line. There are children, Indigenous children, that died all across the US as well. I was just there last summer. I was on assignment for National Geographic, and I went to Pennsylvania, to Carlisle, where one of the most infamous Indian boarding schools was. I followed the roads by Sioux Lakota, who repatriated their children who had died there. They gave them a beautiful traditional burial. The graves of your children there, the Indigenous children in the United States, are about to be unearthed across the nation. So, this is something our people have been dealing with and have known for a long time, but it’s just now being exposed to the mainstream.

Marc Steiner: So, there was a stat. Let me start with this – I probably neglected to write it down, but you’ll probably remember it. In this story, when you mention foster children, you mentioned the percentage of Canadians who are Native, who are Indigenous, and the percentage, which I think was 55% if it was not more, of children who are forced into foster care. Is that right?

Brandi Morin: I think our percentage maybe makes up about 5% now, of Indigenous in Canada. Yeah, I think it’s closer to about 60% of the children that are in the child welfare system.

Marc Steiner: So, when I think about that, when I read that, when I read about the numbers of missing Indigenous women, and murdered Indigenous women that has taken place today, these man camps around that are actually at the heart of most of the murdered women and the rape of these women, and then the stories about people being taken away, can you talk a bit about what the struggle is against that, and what people are doing to stop that? What should take its place?

Brandi Morin: At the heart of it is racism. It’s been that from day one. It’s apathy. It’s apathy from our governments and from the justice systems, from the inadequate policing systems that we have. For instance, I was just up in Wet’suwet’en territories a few weeks ago in Northern British Columbia, where the Wet’suwet’en people have been in a fight against the coastal gasoline pipeline that’s being built through their unceded territories. They don’t want it there. They don’t want their lands and waters to be destroyed by industry. They’re also concerned about the impacts to their communities, the impacts to their women. It happens to be in an area that’s parallel to what’s known as the Highway of Tears, where dozens of, mostly Indigenous, women and girls have disappeared or vanished.

I was up there, and the RCMP, which are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have been deployed to those territories on behalf of industry to make sure that this project gets done. Meanwhile, they’re harassing and intimidating these Indigenous land defenders every single day. There has been well over $20 million that the police have put into arresting and antagonizing these people that are just defending their rights. It struck me because here we are parallel to this Highway of Tears, and so little has been done. So little amount of resources have been put into addressing this crisis that we have, this genocide. Yet, they’ll bring in dozens of police daily to harass these Indigenous land defenders on behalf of industry. It puts it into perspective. On our end it doesn’t make sense, but it does make sense when you understand what their agenda is. Their agenda is to extract, their agenda is the economy. They’re not interested in human rights. They’re not focused on protecting Indigenous women from these harms. It’s blatantly apparent.

Marc Steiner: I’m going to come back to what you were just saying, but it made me think about one of the pieces that you were writing about, which is about missing and murdered women. That really… It just pierced my heart, because I saw my own daughters, one of whom is part Indigenous. I could see her face in that little girl’s face. When you wrote about Mike Balczer, his voice alone, he is so compelling.

Talk a bit about that. I don’t want to get emotional about it, but it really gets to me that we’re talking about babies, young girls, children being murdered and raped on this highway you talk about in Canada. It’s all part of the exploitation of the resources, which doesn’t give a damn about people’s lands or lives. And snatching children away to put them in foster care. All these things are wrapped around. So the question is, how do we begin to unravel this and stop it? There’s got to be a movement beyond just Indigenous people that says no.

Brandi Morin: Yeah, Mike’s daughter, Jessica Patrick was 18 years old. She was a young mother. She had a baby. Her body was found dumped off a cliff outside of Smithers in Northern British Columbia. Her murder remains unsolved. The police haven’t really done much about it.

We had a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Coming up on three years in June, it will be, that the final report and calls to justice were released. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that he and his government would do everything in their power to implement these calls to justice and to take action. It was rhetoric. Little to nothing is being done, or has been done. It’s heartbreaking. Our women are continuing to die. We had a young woman in Vancouver whose body was just found last week dumped in somebody’s backyard. It’s continual, and it’s not a priority. It’s just not a priority.

But there are grassroots people, there are grassroots organizations that are doing what they can to raise awareness. There are campaigns, there are different avenues such as social media for education. Even I, as a journalist, I use my platform. I am a survivor. I ran away from a group home when I was 12 years old, and was held against my will and raped by older men. I could have been a statistic. I have a book called Our Voice Of Fire talking about that, and trying to humanize our people, and humanize our women, because our women haven’t been looked at as human beings. We’ve been looked at as runaways, as drunks, and not valued. It’s trying to bring that understanding. Because there’s just been such a separation, such a segregation. And an understanding of our cultures, and an understanding of the harms that we’re done, and the things that we’re healing from, and just such disrespect towards our people and towards our women. So, most of the work is being done via a grassroots level.

Marc Steiner: Do you think this combination of what happened with the Pope, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, with the activism of Indigenous people and other people that were allied with that, massive demonstrations have taken place, can actually begin to make the kind of definitive change that’s needed?

Brandi Morin: Yeah, it’s not going to happen overnight. I’ve been told this over and over by elders, by Indigenous leaders, by survivors. Many survivors and intergenerational survivors are on a healing journey, and there’s no linear path on that healing journey. Everybody’s at different stages. Whether they are processing that grief, processing that anger, whether they are ready to forgive, whether they are prepared to move forward. Is the Pope’s apology an answer? No, but it’s a step. It’s a step. I was told by Chief Wilton Littlechild, who is a revered Indigenous lawyer and leader, who is also a survivor who was at the Vatican, he said, it’s key because now our people are able to move forward in forgiving. Because that couldn’t happen before when there was no acknowledgement of wrong.

So, this process of reconciliation, it could take generations. It’s on a very personal, intimate, and individual level, but it’s also a collective level. Yes, there are allies that are very passionate. There are allies such as yourself who are doing that work to really understand the truth of the brutality of our history and to reckon with where we are now in order to move forward together, because ultimately that’s what we have to do. We are all here with the different Indigenous nations that have called these lands home for millennia. The European nations’ settlers that are here now, we’re not going anywhere. Neither of us are going anywhere. So, it’s about that healing together, and walking that path forward together. It’s going to be painful. It’s going to be ugly, but it’s also going to be worth it.

Marc Steiner: Right. Exactly. I think that one of the things you’ve done in the pieces that you’ve written and produced is you’ve shown also the beauty and power of Indigenous men and women who have suffered through this, but are building lives and standing up to it and saying, we’re going to change it and fight it. That’s an important piece.

Brandi Morin: They wanted to take our languages away. They wanted to take our cultures away. They wanted to strip us of our identity, and our laws, and our spirituality. But we are reclaiming everything that was stolen in a very powerful way, and it’s a really beautiful thing to witness. My kôkom, my grandmother, was a survivor of residential schools. I am a part of that new generation that is going back to who we are, but just reclaiming it to where we are now. I feel really blessed to be a part of that, no matter how difficult a process this healing is.

Marc Steiner: Well, Brandi Morin, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. I really do appreciate all the work you’re doing, and the writing you do, and getting these stories out. We will do our best to get them out with you here at The Real News. That’s a commitment. Folks who are listening, watching this, on the page I have linked to all the articles that Brandi has written for Al Jazeera and more that touches on the subjects we talked about today. You can get a really in-depth look. Brandi, before I let you go, what’s next on your agenda?

Brandi Morin: Oh my gosh. I’m working on so many different things. I’m actually working on a feature documentary with Two Canoes Media and Pyramid Productions from Rome. My book, Our Voice Of Fire, is coming out. I’m working on a podcast series for Canadaland. I’m also working on another feature documentary film. I have a lot of different irons in the fire. I appreciate all the work that you’re doing. What you’re doing is a key part of reconciliation, and I want to honor you and thank you for that.

Marc Steiner: Thank you, Brandi. Thank you very much for joining us again. Look forward to talking to you again very soon.

Brandi Morin: Hay-hay [thank you].

Marc Steiner: Thank you all for joining us today. You can find links to more about this conversation here on the site. Please let me know what you think about what you heard today, and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I will get right back to you. Again, the links to Brandi Morin’s articles will be attached to this story.

I want to thank Adam Coley, Stephen Frank, Cameron Granadino, and Kayla Rivera, our hard working creative team here at The Real News for making the show happen. Thank you all again for joining us. I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

Indigenous people have long stressed the unspeakable horrors of residential (boarding) schools in North America. Last year, those horrors were made inescapably real for many when mass graves were unearthed at multiple school locations in Canada. Since then, the fight to confront the colonial and genocidal function of these schools has ramped up, and that fight reached a new height when a delegation of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis leaders met with Pope Francis at the Vatican—a meeting that was followed by a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s role in driving the residential school system. In this installment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc welcomes back journalist Brandi Morin, who was at the Vatican for last month’s historic meeting, to discuss the ways that the colonial violence embodied in residential schools lives on today.

Brandi Morin is an award-winning French/Cree/Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets, including Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, The National Observer, The New York Times, Vice Canada, and CBC Indigenous. Read Morin’s latest reporting here. 

Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday on TRNN, and subscribe to the TRNN YouTube channel for video versions of The Marc Steiner Show podcast.

Pre-Production/Studio: Adam Coley

Post-Production: Stephen Frank

TRANSCRIPT

Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, great to have you all with us once again.

We are joined once again by Brandi Morin, who’s a leading Canadian journalist of Cree, Iroquois, and French descent, who covers with in-depth analysis the social, political, cultural life, and struggles of Indigenous peoples in Canada. She’s written a lot for Al Jazeera. A number of series on Al Jazeera, she’s been covering the Pope’s trip to Rome, which we’ll be talking about, apologizing for the past crimes against Indian people, to unearthing the heart-rendering murders and colonial story of Canadian boarding schools, where Indian children went from the 1870s to the 1990s.

We’ll explore the deep connection there is today between the destruction of Indigenous culture, these boarding schools, what the Pope did, to the missing and murdered among Native women that takes place in Canada, like it does here in the United States. Once again, Brandi, welcome. Good to have you with us, really good to have you with us.

Brandi Morin: Tânisi [“hello” in Plains Cree], Marc, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marc Steiner: I’m glad you could make the time. I know you’re covering 17 things at once.

Brandi Morin: I love it though.

Marc Steiner: Wouldn’t have it any other way. So, let’s start with the trip to Rome and what that was about, and the story also in that of Lorelei Williams, the woman that you centered in one of your stories around that trip to Rome. So, take us back a bit, A, how you got there, and what this was? What’s the history of this?

Brandi Morin: Yeah. So, this was a historic meeting between Pope Francis and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit delegates from so-called Canada. The Pope had invited them to talk about the evils of the residential school system, in which the Catholic role played a huge role. They ran close to 70% of the Indian residential schools in Canada, and we know that Indigenous children were kidnapped, stolen from their families, and forced to attend these assimilative schools, where most often they experience severe neglect and sexual, emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, and were punished for speaking their languages, and just degraded as children in every way. Thousands of them didn’t make it out alive.

The world was shocked last summer when some of the graves of our children began to be unearthed. It started in Kamloops, BC where 215 unmarked graves were found. Then it started snowballing across the country where these former residential schools were, where these graves are being discovered. So, there was a lot of grieving, a lot of pain.

So, there was the Anglican Church, the Prosperian Churches that were involved in running these schools, but the Catholic Church administered the majority of them and funded by the federal government, they were the only church that still hadn’t apologized. The survivors and families of survivors have advocated for years for an apology from the head of the Church, which was the Pope. So, the Pope invited this delegation to Rome, and I was privileged to be able to go along and document these historic meetings for Al Jazeera English in late March and early April. It was a pretty incredible experience. It was a devastating, emotional rollercoaster of a ride.

Marc Steiner: I was thinking, there’s a couple of things that popped through my head as you were speaking, but let me focus in. One of the stories you did, at the center of this story was this woman Lorelei Williams. There’s this amazing cape that she is wearing, this red cape. She talked about her mother, who lived through the schools, and her father, who was a famous artist who lived through the schools, and how her mother became an alcoholic. You can tell her story more, but it just was so moving. She said, “I 100% feel like the government killed her. I even wanted to sue them. The government has killed all our people that have died before their time. My mother was trying to numb that pain, that’s what killed her. The colonizers wanted to wipe our people off our lands.” So, talk about her, and your interaction with her, what you saw in her, and what her story is, and how is kind of emblematic of the literal genocide motor against Indigenous people in Canada?

Brandi Morin: Absolutely. Literal genocide, yes. So, I’ve known Lorelei for a number of years, Lorelei Williams. She’s an Indigenous advocate. She’s an advocate for Indigenous justice as well for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. So, she had found out about this meeting happening in Rome, and she told me she knew she just had to be there. Both of her parents attended residential schools, both of them are now deceased. So what she did was she paid her own way there. She wasn’t a part of the official delegation.

I wanted to connect with her right away, so we decided to go to the home of the gladiators, to the Coliseum one evening. She brought this stunning silk cape that is in honoring of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. She wore it there at the Coliseum, and the sun was setting. She started to tell me the story of how her parents survived these houses of horrors, and how her mother experienced sexual abuse, and physical abuse, and emotional, everything that you can imagine, and how her mother dealt with that pain. She became an alcoholic, and she literally drank herself to death. She went into liver failure, and her father died young, too. It was absolutely heartbreaking. But she was there not only for her parents, but to bring awareness to this crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that is a symptom of colonization, that is a remnant of the violence of these residential school systems.

Our women are being stolen like our children were stolen. Our women are being targeted for violence just like our children were targeted for violence. This hasn’t stopped, it’s ongoing today. So, she wanted to bring that urgent message to Pope Francis, and hoped that it would get out just by her being there, even though she wasn’t a part of the delegation.

Marc Steiner: Do you think the Pope heard her?

Brandi Morin: I think so. I know that the delegates brought up a number of these concerns with the Pope in their private meetings with him. Her presence was very prominent there in Rome. She went to St. Peter’s Basilica and sang there and danced there, and supported the survivors, walked with the survivors. So, hopefully the Pope became aware or is aware of these continuing genocides.

Marc Steiner: There’s so many other places that we could take these conversations because of all you’ve been writing about and all you experienced with the Pope, also your stories about the missing and murdered women that continues to this day. I want to explore with you just for a moment these connections, what they mean. I think people don’t… In Canada there’s this Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the United States has failed to do at all yet, to even take that step.

But the whole reality of, what you can describe, thousands of Indigenous children, of Native children who were killed, died in those boarding schools, buried in unmarked graves, across Canada. To me, as I read about it, I remember I did a story about the men’s camps in the United States years back with the same thing that’s happening, where all these mostly white men working on the oil pipelines ended up raping and attacking Indian women across the country. The same thing happens in Canada. There’s a horrendous connection, for me anyway, between those two that’s an arc, that it’s connected. I’m wondering if you could explore that for a bit, and also give people watching, listening, the sense of what happened in those boarding schools and the stories that came out of there?

Brandi Morin: Yeah. So, when the European colonizers first arrived on Turtle Island, they had an agenda to mine the gold, to extract the resources, and to steal the land. It brought violence. That violence was also projected onto the people of the land, the Indigenous people, and especially the Indigenous women. So, any violence against our Mother Earth, it transcribes onto violence against our mothers, against our daughters, against our sisters. So, that always has gone hand in hand.

Our mothers are the life givers, the life givers to our children. Our children were targeted by these colonizers who wanted to take control, who wanted to take over these lands that our people have called [home for] millennia. They started to kill us off, and then they targeted the children to attempt to assimilate them because our ways were considered savage, our ways were considered pagan and evil. They tried to indoctrinate Indigenous children into their culture and their ways, and they did it by force.

It all translates to what’s happening today. The residential school era did not end. We still have thousands and thousands of Indigenous children that are forcibly removed from their homes today, because they are overrepresented in the child welfare system. Because our families are reeling from the effects of colonization, from the effects of the abuses of these boarding schools, and not given the resources or the opportunities to heal. Our children are being taken continuously. Our children make up the majority of children in the child welfare system in Canada. It’s a complete money maker.

And the extractive industry is ongoing. Canada is built on industry. It is a mining nation, and it’s continuing to perpetuate that violence against our people. Our people are still being removed from their lands. Our people are still being targeted for violence. And we know that the violence that industry brings, whether it’s through man camps or whether it’s through the violation of Indigenous rights, that our women are being raped and murdered. Everything is connected. The thing is, this isn’t something of the past. This is something that is continuous, that is ongoing.

Even in the United States, these borders were created by the colonizers, but the effects go all the way down the line. There are children, Indigenous children, that died all across the US as well. I was just there last summer. I was on assignment for National Geographic, and I went to Pennsylvania, to Carlisle, where one of the most infamous Indian boarding schools was. I followed the roads by Sioux Lakota, who repatriated their children who had died there. They gave them a beautiful traditional burial. The graves of your children there, the Indigenous children in the United States, are about to be unearthed across the nation. So, this is something our people have been dealing with and have known for a long time, but it’s just now being exposed to the mainstream.

Marc Steiner: So, there was a stat. Let me start with this – I probably neglected to write it down, but you’ll probably remember it. In this story, when you mention foster children, you mentioned the percentage of Canadians who are Native, who are Indigenous, and the percentage, which I think was 55% if it was not more, of children who are forced into foster care. Is that right?

Brandi Morin: I think our percentage maybe makes up about 5% now, of Indigenous in Canada. Yeah, I think it’s closer to about 60% of the children that are in the child welfare system.

Marc Steiner: So, when I think about that, when I read that, when I read about the numbers of missing Indigenous women, and murdered Indigenous women that has taken place today, these man camps around that are actually at the heart of most of the murdered women and the rape of these women, and then the stories about people being taken away, can you talk a bit about what the struggle is against that, and what people are doing to stop that? What should take its place?

Brandi Morin: At the heart of it is racism. It’s been that from day one. It’s apathy. It’s apathy from our governments and from the justice systems, from the inadequate policing systems that we have. For instance, I was just up in Wet’suwet’en territories a few weeks ago in Northern British Columbia, where the Wet’suwet’en people have been in a fight against the coastal gasoline pipeline that’s being built through their unceded territories. They don’t want it there. They don’t want their lands and waters to be destroyed by industry. They’re also concerned about the impacts to their communities, the impacts to their women. It happens to be in an area that’s parallel to what’s known as the Highway of Tears, where dozens of, mostly Indigenous, women and girls have disappeared or vanished.

I was up there, and the RCMP, which are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have been deployed to those territories on behalf of industry to make sure that this project gets done. Meanwhile, they’re harassing and intimidating these Indigenous land defenders every single day. There has been well over $20 million that the police have put into arresting and antagonizing these people that are just defending their rights. It struck me because here we are parallel to this Highway of Tears, and so little has been done. So little amount of resources have been put into addressing this crisis that we have, this genocide. Yet, they’ll bring in dozens of police daily to harass these Indigenous land defenders on behalf of industry. It puts it into perspective. On our end it doesn’t make sense, but it does make sense when you understand what their agenda is. Their agenda is to extract, their agenda is the economy. They’re not interested in human rights. They’re not focused on protecting Indigenous women from these harms. It’s blatantly apparent.

Marc Steiner: I’m going to come back to what you were just saying, but it made me think about one of the pieces that you were writing about, which is about missing and murdered women. That really… It just pierced my heart, because I saw my own daughters, one of whom is part Indigenous. I could see her face in that little girl’s face. When you wrote about Mike Balczer, his voice alone, he is so compelling.

Talk a bit about that. I don’t want to get emotional about it, but it really gets to me that we’re talking about babies, young girls, children being murdered and raped on this highway you talk about in Canada. It’s all part of the exploitation of the resources, which doesn’t give a damn about people’s lands or lives. And snatching children away to put them in foster care. All these things are wrapped around. So the question is, how do we begin to unravel this and stop it? There’s got to be a movement beyond just Indigenous people that says no.

Brandi Morin: Yeah, Mike’s daughter, Jessica Patrick was 18 years old. She was a young mother. She had a baby. Her body was found dumped off a cliff outside of Smithers in Northern British Columbia. Her murder remains unsolved. The police haven’t really done much about it.

We had a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Coming up on three years in June, it will be, that the final report and calls to justice were released. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that he and his government would do everything in their power to implement these calls to justice and to take action. It was rhetoric. Little to nothing is being done, or has been done. It’s heartbreaking. Our women are continuing to die. We had a young woman in Vancouver whose body was just found last week dumped in somebody’s backyard. It’s continual, and it’s not a priority. It’s just not a priority.

But there are grassroots people, there are grassroots organizations that are doing what they can to raise awareness. There are campaigns, there are different avenues such as social media for education. Even I, as a journalist, I use my platform. I am a survivor. I ran away from a group home when I was 12 years old, and was held against my will and raped by older men. I could have been a statistic. I have a book called Our Voice Of Fire talking about that, and trying to humanize our people, and humanize our women, because our women haven’t been looked at as human beings. We’ve been looked at as runaways, as drunks, and not valued. It’s trying to bring that understanding. Because there’s just been such a separation, such a segregation. And an understanding of our cultures, and an understanding of the harms that we’re done, and the things that we’re healing from, and just such disrespect towards our people and towards our women. So, most of the work is being done via a grassroots level.

Marc Steiner: Do you think this combination of what happened with the Pope, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, with the activism of Indigenous people and other people that were allied with that, massive demonstrations have taken place, can actually begin to make the kind of definitive change that’s needed?

Brandi Morin: Yeah, it’s not going to happen overnight. I’ve been told this over and over by elders, by Indigenous leaders, by survivors. Many survivors and intergenerational survivors are on a healing journey, and there’s no linear path on that healing journey. Everybody’s at different stages. Whether they are processing that grief, processing that anger, whether they are ready to forgive, whether they are prepared to move forward. Is the Pope’s apology an answer? No, but it’s a step. It’s a step. I was told by Chief Wilton Littlechild, who is a revered Indigenous lawyer and leader, who is also a survivor who was at the Vatican, he said, it’s key because now our people are able to move forward in forgiving. Because that couldn’t happen before when there was no acknowledgement of wrong.

So, this process of reconciliation, it could take generations. It’s on a very personal, intimate, and individual level, but it’s also a collective level. Yes, there are allies that are very passionate. There are allies such as yourself who are doing that work to really understand the truth of the brutality of our history and to reckon with where we are now in order to move forward together, because ultimately that’s what we have to do. We are all here with the different Indigenous nations that have called these lands home for millennia. The European nations’ settlers that are here now, we’re not going anywhere. Neither of us are going anywhere. So, it’s about that healing together, and walking that path forward together. It’s going to be painful. It’s going to be ugly, but it’s also going to be worth it.

Marc Steiner: Right. Exactly. I think that one of the things you’ve done in the pieces that you’ve written and produced is you’ve shown also the beauty and power of Indigenous men and women who have suffered through this, but are building lives and standing up to it and saying, we’re going to change it and fight it. That’s an important piece.

Brandi Morin: They wanted to take our languages away. They wanted to take our cultures away. They wanted to strip us of our identity, and our laws, and our spirituality. But we are reclaiming everything that was stolen in a very powerful way, and it’s a really beautiful thing to witness. My kôkom, my grandmother, was a survivor of residential schools. I am a part of that new generation that is going back to who we are, but just reclaiming it to where we are now. I feel really blessed to be a part of that, no matter how difficult a process this healing is.

Marc Steiner: Well, Brandi Morin, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. I really do appreciate all the work you’re doing, and the writing you do, and getting these stories out. We will do our best to get them out with you here at The Real News. That’s a commitment. Folks who are listening, watching this, on the page I have linked to all the articles that Brandi has written for Al Jazeera and more that touches on the subjects we talked about today. You can get a really in-depth look. Brandi, before I let you go, what’s next on your agenda?

Brandi Morin: Oh my gosh. I’m working on so many different things. I’m actually working on a feature documentary with Two Canoes Media and Pyramid Productions from Rome. My book, Our Voice Of Fire, is coming out. I’m working on a podcast series for Canadaland. I’m also working on another feature documentary film. I have a lot of different irons in the fire. I appreciate all the work that you’re doing. What you’re doing is a key part of reconciliation, and I want to honor you and thank you for that.

Marc Steiner: Thank you, Brandi. Thank you very much for joining us again. Look forward to talking to you again very soon.

Brandi Morin: Hay-hay [thank you].

Marc Steiner: Thank you all for joining us today. You can find links to more about this conversation here on the site. Please let me know what you think about what you heard today, and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I will get right back to you. Again, the links to Brandi Morin’s articles will be attached to this story.

I want to thank Adam Coley, Stephen Frank, Cameron Granadino, and Kayla Rivera, our hard working creative team here at The Real News for making the show happen. Thank you all again for joining us. I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

In our final First Nations Friday, we discuss the ongoing protests at Trump’s U.S./Mexico border wall, where Indigenous communities call for an end to colonial borders with our guests founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism Jen Deerinwater and Miwok journalist and community organizer Desiree Kane. We also have a special announcement about a new show coming to The Real News Network! You can watch The Real News Network’s “Burn It Down with Kim Brown” live, every Tuesday and Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern Time! To support “Burn It Down with Kim Brown” you can donate here Subscribe to Burn It Down with Kim Brown as a podcast on: Apple Podcasts Google Podcast and Spotify Make sure to follow us on Twitter @TheRealNews and like us on Facebook at The Real News Network!

Studio: Dwayne Gladden
Production: Taylor Hebden, Genevieve Montinar