Many of us have become familiar with environmental justice scholarship beginning prose as images of looming catastrophe—hungry forest fires swallowing homes, once pulsing waterways choked by drought, and emissions from a languid chemical valley settling into skies that were once vivid blue. I, like many people directly affected by one or several of these situations, would argue that the images don’t overdramatize the environmental impact of industrial extraction and global warming. Nevertheless, the raucous clamoring of immediate needs can lead many readers, even those directly impacted by environmental justice issues, to experience environmental concerns as subordinate to the drum of daily life—especially amid a global pandemic. When talking about our relationship of the earth’s health to our health, addressing the relation between the environmental policy and the impacts of COVID-19, I suggest, is as needed as weaving together the issues of land, treaties, and responsibilities.
Roots of Resistance
Why weave? When I woke up to finish this writing, I thought about a picture that I took with one of my aunties, Deb Abrahamson, who recently gifted me a cedar basket she and her daughter Twa-le made. After fighting on behalf of our community for years against radioactive contamination, my auntie passed away from cancer. In thinking about her labor, I thought about the work that the cedar basket and she had done to gather us one spring day to harvest roots, and the work she had done for her community. My auntie wove different issues and peoples together, and I witnessed this weaving when I spoke to Indigenous womxn on the frontlines. Where there is grief and sorrow, our aunties bring strength and beauty. Against stories that silo “environment” from all other things, their stories draw together the resistance of well-known water protectors to less celebrated aunties working countless hours in domestic violence shelters, language classes, foster homes, and community gardens. Their stories draw together the resistance of past generations to unsettled futures when they draw our ancestors, families, and future children back into the same place. Their stories weave land, treaties, and responsibilities.
Indigenous resistance has never been just about “land,” at least in the way that concept is most commonly used. In other words, when Indigenous communities speak of land and treaties, they are essentially forced into speaking a kind of shorthand, and, sadly, much is left to the translation of those in power. Chief R. Stacey Laforme of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation explains it this way, “If you read a treaty agreement and it seems to you as if it is settled, I want you to know that there is a lot of history to unearth about different perspectives. Treaties were developed for a purpose by the government to claim the land, and they were and still are, unfair, untruthful, and unscrupulous, and sometimes just wrong. Treaties talk about ownership of land. A concept even today when I talk about ownership of land, I am compromised. I see our Mother the Earth as alive.” To speak of land as property compromises who we are. Land is not simply a noun or object of possession, but a relationship to our relatives, human and more-than-human.
Mending the Land and Each Other
“When our land heals, we heal,” my Auntie Melodi Wynne told me as we talked about her work in our community. Responding to community concerns about trauma and the power of coming together around food, she and tribal leadership created a garden. When she tells the story of x̣x̣súl̓eʔxʷ (the garden’s name, which translates to “nice little place of good ground”), she explains that in 2014, the Spokane Tribe of Indians hosted a Food Sovereignty and Safety Event at the tribal longhouse and updated its Sustainable Community Master Plan to state: “Many shared concerns regarding the current health of our people and the land. Rising suicide rates, cancers, diabetes, and environmental toxins are indicators of the challenges our people face in living healthy lives.” Responding to concerns about trauma and the power of coming together around food, she and tribal leadership created a garden and then another, stepping up to the plate and exemplifying the assertion made in the master plan that, “With each challenge comes an opportunity just as with treaty rights comes responsibilities.”
Belonging to what is now known as the upper Columbia Plateau, our People gathered sustenance from all directions, but after the federally funded Lewis and Clark Expedition, surveyors and traders were followed by missionaries and war parties. In 1881, President Rutherford B. Hayes formally established the Spokane Indian Reservation, a 154,602.57-acre reserve. In settler legality, the U.S. government “owns” the land, and it is held in “trust” by the tribe.
Our economies (modes of relation to land, foods, and each other) changed over the decades due to settlement, the damning of our rivers, and other settler state laws meant to either remove or assimilate us. In the 1950s, with the creation of the Sherwood and Midnite uranium mines, the tribe found some “economic relief.” However, the U.S. government, which authorized the mines and the corporations that operated them, did not inform miners and families of the dangerous impact the glowing rocks could have on their bodies. After uranium prices plummeted and the mines closed, we are left to mourn the loss of family and land from the poisons. In addition, housing wells throughout the reservation are also contaminated with “naturally occurring” uranium deposits. What is not naturally occurring is the situation in which we find ourselves.
Uranium contamination from old dumpsites now threatens the x̣x̣súl̓eʔxʷ, and Melodi and others are doing their best to honor their commitments to x̣x̣súl̓eʔxʷ. “Even if the land is contaminated,” Melodi said to me, “we are not going to abandon it. We are going to heal it.” When I connected her powerful words to our youth struggling with drugs and alcohol, gang violence, and suicide–issues often captured in mainstream media coverage without a discussion of the settler colonial political context in which these have become realities–she responded, “It’s like our Elders told us, ‘Our historical trauma cannot be healed until the land is healed.’ That gives us a sense of how long this process will take. So, we need to get started.” Indexing historical trauma is an act of indexing both the context of structural genocide and Indigenous refusal to consider issues as essential to who we are as a people. Thus, at the same time, she asserts, “Food sovereignty has been practiced since time immemorial. We’re not doing anything new.”
Rice, Race, and Well-Being
In 2016, Melodi also joined relatives, including SHAWL Society, drawn from our basin to the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri River, the place known for the Standing Rock fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Standing Rock was cited as the largest gathering of Indigenous Peoples from across the world. Early coverage of the movement, including U.S. sociological presentations, described actions at Standing Rock as either environmental or anti-capitalist, and some critical environmentalists asserted the overlapping of these analytical framings.
While many Indigenous womxn at Standing Rock narrated their resistance to racism and capitalist extraction, they also asserted their embodied prayers were part of protecting their communities from ongoing dispossession and violence—in other words, anti-colonial. I assert these affirmations because DAPL is not out of the ground and because other “black snakes” are rising.
Line 3 is a transnational, 34-inch diameter, 1,097-mile long tar sands oil pipeline that extends from Edmonton, Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin. It is not only transnational in that it cuts from Canada to the U.S., but also in the way that it snakes its way across both ceded and unceded lands of Indigenous Nations. Under treaty obligations, the Anishinaabeg are guaranteed access to their foods and general well-being. Line 3 threatens to violate those rights by threatening the water and wild rice provided by these lands. Wild rice, as Couchiching First Nation land defender Tara Houska points out, is a central grounding for the Anishinaabeg worldview. Speaking in protest of Line 3 from the banks of the Crow Wing River in northern Minnesota, she explained:
“We don’t just solve [the climate crisis] by replacing it with a different kind of energy. We have to fundamentally change the way we are connected to the Earth. We have to fundamentally change our relationship to the Earth, and to each other.” Houska continues, “It breaks my heart to be born and raised in Minnesota and to know that this place is known for the murder of George Floyd, that this place is going to be known for building one of the largest tar sands infrastructure projects in North America in the face of climate crisis…” As I write, Tara Houska with other treaty people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are engaging in a mass direct action to stop the assault.
Tara Houska’s connection between Indigenous genocide and anti-Black violence reminded me of what writer and historian Patrick Wolfe said about settler colonialism and the violence of policing our communities in his Journal of Genocide Research article “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”: “Today in the US, the blatant racial zoning of large cities and the penal system suggests that once colonized people outlive their utility, settler societies can fall back on the repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby they have also dealt with the native surplus.” Settler colonialism operates through the subjective and material seizure of land and peoples across racial lines, forming us, as Patrick Wolfe writes, “in its targeting.” I continue to listen to Houska as she continues, weaving trauma, healing, and refusal. She says, “No more Black and Brown bodies murdered. No more sacrifice zones of people. Our lives do matter….Our wild rice matters. We’ve been here since before Minnesota. Since before the United States. We deserve to have a future.”
The Gift of “Fierce and Loving Mobilization”
Without water bodies, our carbon bodies shut down. In the U. S. and Canada, everything citizens have, including running water in kitchen faucets, results from past treaty negotiations. This is what is meant when scholars and organizers say, “We are all treaty people.” Though governing powers made these contracts on behalf of their citizens, they have often failed to uphold their agreements.
In Canada, Indigenous Nations are disproportionately affected by boil water advisories and suffer from related serious health consequences. For example, the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario has been under a boil water advisory for 25 years. For much of this time, the community has relied on bottled drinking water and supplemented their water needs, for things like bathing and flushing their toilets, by drawing water directly from their reservoir. Then in October 2020 an unknown oily sheen appeared in the water. After tests found high levels of hydrocarbons in the water, Neskantaga children and their families were evacuated from their homes. Neskantaga Chief Chris Moonias pointed out, the water issue is not simply a lack of infrastructure but an oppressive system of bureaucracy that stops First Nations from thriving, and adds that social health issues are an effect of this oppression. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, who had vowed to end all long-term drinking water advisories by March 2021, announced that the project to address the water issues experienced by First Nations was “postponed” due to efforts being directed at the global pandemic.
During the same time, a student reporter happened to reach out to me about Toronto’s housing crisis and COVID-19. As we talked, I could not but help to point out that Neskantaga community members were gathered down the street in a park to protest their treatment, having been effectively forced from their homes as a result of settler colonial history evidenced in long-standing systematic abandonment within the context of settler colonialism.
Indigenous Peoples are not fighting against “technology” such as that needed to get fresh drinking water to Indigenous Nations, poor, and racialized communities. To the contrary, Indigenous Peoples from around the world have been foundational to technological advancements. What Indigenous Peoples are fighting against is nothing short of genocide.
When a Water Protector asserts #LandBack, I understand this as a refusal to being further compromised and an assertion to honoring our relations and responsibilities. And as Chief Laforme asserted during Canada’s official 2020 Treaties Recognition Week, “Energy, life, and spirit exist in all things. How can you own that?” Regardless of who is in charge of settler states, settler colonialism is about the process by which Indigenous Peoples have been, and continue to be, dispossessed from the land. This is what Patrick Wolfe has called the “logic of elimination.” Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explain in their American Quarterly article “Grounded Normativity/Place-Based Solidarity”: “Attacking the relationality of Indigenous political orders through the strategic targeting of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land has been a site of intense white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, serving as a mechanism to submit Indigenous lands and labor to the demands of capitalist accumulation and state-formation. Historically, Indigenous peoples have responded to this violence and negation through fierce and loving mobilization.”
Conclusion
One day my auntie had called me to come to dig roots with her. After making the trip with my children, after her introducing me to a site I had not yet harvested, after sharing food and laughing, after talking about contamination and the efforts to gather community members, but just before we were about to part ways, she called me over and gifted a cedar basket. She explained, with her daughter Twa-le standing beside her, their process of putting together the basket. While this once common knowledge was broken from us, she and Twa-le refused to abandon the relationship. Instead, working to mend, pulling together with others and cedar in the process of the basket’s creation, she told me, the basket was to ensure that I would return. She and the basket folded all of us in.
Photo: Food Sovereignty Garden, April 2021. Credit: Brad Sweet, courtesy of Rawhide Press.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
