Book: Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations.
The predicament of today’s Native Americans is not a new development. In All Our Relations, Native Winona LaDuke details this with little ceremony, but what we do not expect is the extent of the all-too-common issues. For centuries, almost their entire way of life has consisted of a struggle, from the Seminole Wars (p.28-9) to the nuclear facility sited next to the Native childcare centre and the 2000-year old burial mound (p.106). Past and present (and probably future) have described a one-way imbalance in the fortunes of Natives and European immigrants. This imbalance is based largely on the simple fact that Natives have not been historically preoccupied with land-ownership. Failure of the United States government to understand this (or more correctly, their inability to resist exploiting it), led to The Buckskin Declaration, on March 1st, 1954. During this event, several Seminole Indians approached the Capitol carrying a large buckskin scroll, a formal petition to the U.S. president, containing an outright rejection of white materialism (p.36). It was not responded to by its intended recipients.
Native Americans, in conflict with government and large corporations over their shrinking and desecrated native lands, fight their own battles. Official allies are thin on the ground, even those charged with the task of protecting Native interests. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the supposed “trustee of the Indian estate” (p.82), has approved leases that are massively injurious to human and environmental conditions. It was the BIA that literally gave away huge tracts of the North Cheyenne reservation to AMAX (p.82), agreeing to terms that were described by a government report as being “among the poorest agreements ever made.” The BIA approved a lease for a nuclear waste storage facility in Goshute, Utah; an area that is physically isolated from effective emergency services should anything fail at any time (p.106) and negotiated right-of-way along the only road that passes through Mdewakanton Dakota Prairie homeland, for a nuclear facility which does not provide “a watt” to the Native community (p106). The plant pays $20 Million in taxes to the nearby city of Red Wing, Minnesota, but the right-of-way was given up for just $178. In Northern Cheyenne and Goshute, the leases were explicit in their understanding that no consideration would be given to increased values in (coal) productivity (p.83), or to a rescission (p.106), in any event. It is a fact that 50% of the country’s uranium, and the vast majority of its low-sulphur coal (p.82, top) lie beneath reservation lands. The BIA is intimately connected to the bureaus responsible for the management of natural resources, and, according to LaDuke, “has stumbled through its existence with the mandate of taking care of something the U.S. government pretty much doesn’t want – Indians” (p.82).
This fight for survival revolves not just around minerals; the siting of various industries and military institutions adjacent to Native lands is at best classic capitalist ignorance, at worst murderous. The opening chapter details the impacts of PCB’s, heavy metals and fluorides (p.17) on inhabitants of the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation on the New York-Canadian border. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil have been contaminated by PCB’s at a nearby GM power train plant (p.12), finding its way into the groundwater and, inevitably, the people. The Reynolds aluminium plant, 1 mile away from Akwesasne, emitted “fluorides at a rate of 400 pounds per hour” (p.15) through the 60’s and into the 70’s, when emissions abatement technology reduced the level to 75 pounds per hour. Dairy herds suffered great losses, due to reproductive impairment and teeth and bone deterioration. Veterinarians from Cornell University determined a link with the aluminium plant (p.15). The reservation has the questionable distinction of being the most contaminated out of 63 different Native communities in the Great Lakes basin – a region that houses a quarter of all North American industry (p.15).
The assault on Native people is not limited to material threats. Such are the conditions on this crowded planet, that population density in Europe (p.55) has created noise pollution on the Nitassinan Peninsula, in the sub-Arctic. The Innu people of that region have been forced to endure what Europeans would not; the incessant screams, booms and bangs of low-flying supersonic jet aircraft engaged in military manoeuvres (p.54). The Innu are a hunting people (p.50), with a vastly different perspective from that of their distant, urban assailants. Women have forever been regarded as the equals of men, and there is no “attachment to specific plots of land” (p.52). When anti-hunting activists pressed them to end their “outmoded” (p.52) way of life and take town wage-work instead, they rejected it as a “dependency” lifestyle. In the 1980’s, NATO and the Canadian government effectively rendered the region uninhabitable (p.55), with a plan to increase the number of fly-overs from 4,000 to 8,000 (which is ironic given that the Canadian government had declared the region to be “wilderness interior free of human habitation” in propaganda brochures at the time). The mastery of hunting and constant sonic booms are qualities that would not evolve together, even if the noise was remotely acceptable for human beings.
Ironically, Natives have a powerful loyalty to the lands over which they refuse to lay claim. Over time, myriad forms of organised resistance to the white man’s ideological influx have evolved. Those military runways in Nitassinan have been continuously picketed by Natives since the 80’s, despite ever-worsening prison terms being handed down (p.57-8). The Akwesasne Mothers’ Milk Project, started by midwife Katsi Cook in 1985 (p.19), has involved Mohawk women as nurturers and educators, who have recognised the science behind food-chain dynamics in regard to how PCB’s have found their way into soil, water, fish – and themselves. This awareness enabled women to modify their diet and lessen the impacts on their babies. In Florida, Indians Claims Commission settlements ($16M for 30 million acres, p.33) eventually divided the Seminoles into the Independent Traditional Seminole Nation and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc. Traditional values and ultra-modern living were sharply delineated. The presence within Indian communities of the former group, according to LaDuke, “provides a yardstick to measure your own values, your own way of life, and your choices.” The latter group, referred to as Bingo Seminoles by Traditionalists, make no apologies for their plunging into capitalist ventures such as gaming establishments, and travelling “in three-piece suits and Lear jets” (p.35). In Northern Cheyenne, Native Action, a grassroots non-profit organisation which has existed for over 15 years (p.75), has been instrumental in Natives achieving success against railroads, banks and mining companies (p.89). The Hopi Foundation, founded in 1985 (p.187), strives not just to preserve ancient Native dwellings, language and culture, but also forges ahead with state-of-the-art green technology in the form of photovoltaic panels, composting toilets, wind-turbines and solar-powered water pumps. The spirit of independence created by these renewable energy sources compliments traditional Hopi philosophy (p.188). These organisations represent tenacious steeples on a plain of struggle.
The foe of the Native is the modern world. Native Americans would still have been practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle had Europeans not landed on their shores. That this way of life is rubbing shoulders with global capitalism (and being erased like graphite from the page of history as it does so) is a tragedy that requires a voice capable of penetrating the highest towers of the white man’s world. The historical perspective of Native inferiority on the part of Europeans is alive and well in Americans living today. The opening page (p.1) of the Introduction to All Our Relations states that wherever there remain a reasonable number of indigenous people, there is usually an accompaniment of reasonable biodiversity. Modern policymakers appear not to appreciate this telling fact.
From the times when English, French, and Spanish colonists began imposing their for-profit, land-consuming mode-of-production, to these modern times of Native organisations and books about the subject, little has really changed. They still hunt (p.58), they continue to regard their world as a web of reciprocity (p.43-4), with a firm belief that you reap what you sow (NASA, p.197), and they remain engaged in a fight for their very existence. LaDuke has documented innumerable war-stories, both bureaucratic and physical, and the connection between these two media runs directly through Europeans’ obsession with owning things. Natives’ lack of an owning culture may work occasionally in their favour, so long as there are men like Judge Igliotorte (p.57), but the nature of capitalism dictates that men obtain delight in acting as the agent of depression in those around them, be it emotional, cultural or economic. LaDuke summarises, “Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.” Let us hope Indigenous knowledge turns the ship around, before we begin the true descent into the maelstrom.
Tags: Native Americans, The Buckskin Declaration, Winona LaDuke