Reclaiming Rights
Session Objective: to identify strategies for reparation and community sovereignty amidst patterns of colonisation
Unit 4 considered formal mechanisms for public engagement in environmental governance: the consultation process of environmental impact assessments, regulatory treaties, legal requirements, and the like. We also explored more informal systems of decision-making, action, and result. Collective action and community organising have been instrumental in social changemaking throughout history.
To conclude Unit 4, this week’s Learning Log examines the question of “sovereignty”: What does that mean? Should it be the goal of environmental justice movements? And – perhaps most critically – sovereignty for whom?
As part of our investigation into sovereignty, this Learning Log also takes a closer look at some of the tactics used to reclaim environmental rights as we prepare for the course’s last major assignment: a Community Campaign, your public participation plan.
(Re)Taking Sovereignty
Challenge: American militarisation with this poem from William Nuʻutupu Giles critiquing the price of citizenship in a colonial settler state.
read transcript
Open letter to Marvel Comics:
I’ve always been confused about your flagship character, Captain America. As one of the most militarised nations in the history of the world, I don’t understand how our
mascot’s primary weapon is a shield.
I feel like he’d be more authentic if he walked around with the nuclear missiles stuffed into his tighty-whities, or if he stalked around waterboarding terrorists with Diet Coke, or if he touted a bag of Big Macs to clog the arteries of his enemies.
If the next Avengers movie is a prequel and we travel back to 1492, would they call Christopher Columbus Captain America? Would his weapon be a flag infected with smallpox?
Or if it was set in Hawaii 1778, would that American Captain’s name be Cook, his weapon a ship full of cholera?
When I see that shield, I’m reminded that one of every eight adult Natives in Guam is a US veteran.
That American Samoa has the top Army recruiting station in the country. That Polynesian Islanders have the highest casualty rates in our armed forces. We are dying to belong.
And I’m beginning to understand the metaphor of Captain America’s weapon. So show me how a man builds a human shield; fills a military with the children of nations he has slain. We in the United States spend over eight times as much of our budget on warfare than we do on education. Then we wait as failing schools spit out kids unserved; wait until the opportunities we dreamed of seemed farther away than the stars our people once used as maps. And we ask the question to the young: “Would you fire a gun to feed your sons? Would you die on a battlefield to build a house for your daughter?”
We in America decry warlords in Africa for enlisting 13-year-old soldiers, while ROTC recruiters fish cadets out of our classrooms. See, when the military grabs the Land your family used to farm, sugar plantation becomes platoon...but when farmers till the earth with guns, the only crop is blood. When war is our only industry, the only crop is blood.
In these territories: American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Northern Mariana and Virgin Islands, the people are unable to cast a vote for the US president who decides where and when we go to war. So they’re a shield with a lip but no mouth; no say what country it will be thrown into next.
We are so much more than wars, bone and blood, fists; more than body made bullet-trap. I will show you how a shield given no voice can still grow teeth, still teach itself how to speak.
We, survivors turned soldiers; we, once and always will be warriors; we, as Captain America. When your shield – Our People – decide our lives are worth more than the price of your citizenship... what will you hide behind then?
William Nuʻutupu Giles is an afakasi Samoan writer and arts educator from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Will has facilitated poetry workshops across Oceania in Papua New Guinea, Guåhan, and Aotearoa. They were also the first Pacific Islander to win the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition.
Will’s poems dig for the political seeds in personal stories. Their work connects contemporary poetry with the Oral Traditions of Polynesian genealogy and crosses oceans of immigrant identity, colonisation, representation, and masculinity.
At home, they have spent the last 10 years working with Youth Speaks Hawaiʻi, giving back to the organisation and community that helped them develop a voice. Will lives for the moment of firsts in a blooming poet’s eyes. The first line, first draft, and the first time someone opens their mouth and believes in the power of their own story.
Listen: to this Indigenous poet’s call out to Justin Trudeau and the Canadian settler government about broken promises, environmental marginalisation, and sovereignty infringements.
read transcript
Hi, my name is Helen and I’m Dane Zaa and Nehiyaw from Prophet River First Nations, living in Fort St. John, B.C., and I wrote a poem for Justin Trudeau. Here you go:
Hey Justin,
There’s some words that I’ve been meaning to get off my chest.
I’ve even traveled twice to Parliament steps.
I’ve heard some of your MPs say that ‘this new relationship is based off of give-and-take’, and ‘we can’t have everything that we’re asking for’.
We have 500 years of giving behind us, but hold up, let me check: Are you good? Or can I get you anything more?
Because your Cabinet Ministers and Departments are sitting behind desks and signing off on permits, while you’re in the public eye paying lip service to Indigenous populations.
Well, y’all are making decisions that are going to be impacting the next seven generations, doing so in spite of Section 35 violations; signing off in light of supposed ‘consultation’.
And now, you are the head of the paternalistic patriarchal structures that be.
The ones that change their names over time from “Indian Affairs” to “Indigenous Affairs”...as if a name change would change the fact that y’all are still operating on the bones of the Indian Act: trying to govern how your ‘Indians’ act.
Or when it comes to sightsee the mega hydro dam that they want to build in this territory, you’d rather we not react. Rather we take your silence for fact, your approval for law, and your blind eyes as reasons for your wrongs.
Well I thought you should know: I’m delivering this poem from within the proposed flood zone, and this land has been my people’s home since time immemorial.
I don’t come from a placeless people.
I come from spines that were made sturdy while sleeping on spruce boughs
From legs that grew strong by scaling the sides of these mountains
And from arms that were taught to navigate these waters that span out like arteries all across this territory.
This land is my ancestors’ living memory.
But do you even understand this concept?
I think that you like to pretend to. Especially when you’re donning headdresses and sporting Indigenous-inspired tattoos. But when we say ‘places have no monetary value’, we actually mean it. Take our ‘nos’ for what they are, because we can't just head south when everything heads south.
We are the ones who have to stay behind and clean up your mess; our children the ones who are gonna have to suffer from your regrets.
So if you want real change you can’t give half measures and only ‘kind of oppress’ only ‘kinda’ continue to violate treaties only ‘kinda’ continue to colonise.
So please don’t promise anything if you’re not even willing to try.
As for me and mine? We’re gonna continue to fight. We’re gonna continue to rise up like sage smoke carrying valley and prairie prayers just like we have done for the past five hundred years.
Because in case you haven’t noticed...in spite of everything...we are still here.
Helen Knott is of Dane Zaa, Nehiyaw, and Euro descent from Prophet River First Nations, living in Northeastern B.C. Helen is a graduate student in First Nations Studies at UNBC. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Social Work.
Helen writes and speaks to share what lessons, insights, and challenges she has experienced. She was once taught that teachings are not yours until you give them away, so her words are a part of her offering back to the people. She has published in a number of places, including a compendium entitled Surviving Canada: Indigenous People Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal. She recently published her first book, In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience, and is currently writing Taking Back the Bones, an “Indigenous female manifesto”.
Define: what is meant by “sovereignty” in various contexts by reading these two brief overviews and the Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Sovereignty in the Arctic.
Inuit Sovereignty Declaration.pdfConsider: what taking Indigenous sovereignty seriously might look like with these resources about the Land Back movement and decolonisation. (You don’t need to read the full handbook, but please read at least the last section on “Decolonization is taking back our power”.)
Learn: about the concept of food sovereignty with La Via Campesina, the International Peasants Movement. (Again, you don’t need to read the full document: focus on the 6 pillars of food sovereignty described on pages 14 and 15.)
Food-Sovereignty-A-guide-Low-Res-Vresion.pdfConfront: binary assumptions about food justice, interspecies relations, and Indigenous rights with @QueerQuechua.
Pınar Sinopoulos-Lloyd is an award-winning Indigenous multi-species futurist, mentor, consultant and eco-philosopher; co-founder of Queer Nature, an “organism” stewarding earth-based queer community through ancestral skills, interspecies relations and rites of passage.
Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is a future transcestor of Quechua, Turkish and Chinese lineages. A central prayer that guides them is envisioning decolonially-informed queer ancestral-futurism through multi-species accountability and the remediation of human supremacy in the Chthulucene. Their prismatic writing is fed by this prayer and is rooted in multi-gender/multi-cultural/multi-racial parallel realities as a neurodivergent. They are in a lifelong apprenticeship to the ecotone of riparian systems.
Organising Communities
Watch: this brief documentary about the #NoDAPL movement. Which tactics did the movement put to use? What was effective? What wasn’t? Would you consider the movement to be a success?
Demand: Land justice with these Indigenous rights campaigns. As you read the summary articles and watch the accompanying music videos, pay particular attention to the barriers created by systems and the specific actions that communities are using to impact change in spite of those hurdles.
Examine: the Assignment Brief for your Community Campaign. Start to brainstorm what problem you might want to address through this public participation plan, and the most suitable method(s) for action on that issue.
NAT_GEO300 - Assignment Brief - Community Campaign.pdfSkim: this report about organising for gender, racial, and environmental justice in California for some tips about your assignment. You don’t need to read the full thing, but pages 28-33 in particular synthesise a few important principles for effective community organising.
fertile-ground_women-organizing-at-the-intersection-of-environmental-justice-and-reproductive-justice_msc.pdfRead: this guide to community organising for an overview of tactics and strategies.
Browse: these sites for more resources on community organising for racial and environmental justice. (Rather than getting ‘lost’ in them right now, you might simply remember that they’re here, and come back to them while you’re creating your Community Campaign for ideas.)
Appreciate: the power of grassroots organising against ‘tidal waves’ of oppression, as showcased by Morales’ work.
In this poster, people stand up against a tidal wave of environmental destruction. “Environmental justice is our cry of defiance against the onslaught of oppressive toxins and toxic oppressions that threaten to submerge our homes.”
The costs of this tidal wave are borne most heavily by the poor, Indigenous people, and people of color. Air, water, and people all need protection.
(Yes, this illustration is a spinoff of the famous “Great Wave” print by Japanese artist Hokusai.)
Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and organizer based in Minneapolis. He uses his art as a form of political medicine to support individual and collective healing from the injuries and ongoing reality of oppression.
He was born into the anti-colonial movement in his native Puerto Rico and was drawn into activism in Chicago when his family moved there in 1967.
Ricardo left high school early and worked in various industries, and over time began to use his art as part of his movement work. This activism has included support work for the Black Panthers and Young Lords and participating in or acting in solidarity with farmers, environmental, labor, racial justice, antiwar and other struggles for peoples empowerment. He was a founding member of the Northland Poster Collective (1979-2009).
He is also leads workshops on creative organizing, social justice strategy and sustainable activism, and mentors and supports organizers. The worker members of RLM Art Studio are represented by the Newspaper and Communications guild/CWA.
Ricardo’s work is widely used by grassroots movements, organizations and communities.
Complete: your Learning Log for this session via the form below.