(part 2)
Below is a link to the article on the issue in the Arctic Refuge. Below that is an additional link to an action you can take if you so choose. I am sure there are other actions available to take as well.
I believe one of the main reasons @Jeanne-Mayell came here and gathered this beautiful and loving tribe together was to help save this earth, to help lesson the impact of the catastrophes which lie ahead. Jeanne, is a fierce Warrior Goddess, an Earth and Water protector who rises up to champion Gaia with honor and passion.
She has also warned us for decades.
We know the severity of the destruction ahead can be lessened if we make some dramatic changes. Let's renew our efforts to take actions. We have accomplish a great step in electing a president who will get us on the right path. We have ridden out that horrible dark time together. We must continue forward, to to make our voices heard and champion our Mother Earth..
It is time for a GREEN WAVE.
Let's focus on the big and the small environmental issues and bring attention to them.
So, I wish to spotlight this issue today. We must not allow the Arctic Refuge to be auctioned off for corporate greed. For any reason.
Be like Jeanne but in your own way and honoring your own self . Be a Warrior God/ or Goddess for Earth. For your future generations. For all life on our planet currently existing and those further lives which are yet to dwell upon her.
Let's help bring about a GREEN WAVE.
Very positive news about Oak Flats.
The Biden administration has withdrawn a Final Environmental Impact Statement and decision that would facilitate the transfer of ownership of Oak Flat, a sacred land to at least a dozen Indigenous Tribes, to a mining company with ties to the destruction of an Aboriginal site in Australia. The move follows years of opposition from Apache-Stronghold , the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, and other Tribal entities, religious leaders, locals, and environmental groups.
Oak Flat is a holy ground where the Apache have prayed and performed ceremonies for centuries. The site is also home to numerous Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs, and medicinal plants.
Thank you, Lovendures, for creating this beautiful thread. I've just come up for air from weeks of focusing on getting our town to vote to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. We won two battles for votes, but there remains one last and most important vote - to get our Select Board (top board of five people) to vote it through. It's been a long process and there is more to come.
Once Columbus Day is finally dismantled and voted out, and Indigenous Peoples Day is voted in, and I pray it will happen here, the collective awareness will rise of indigenous people both those who are here now and those who are gone.
Every October, the schools will be teaching and the media will be reporting the true history of indigenous people. And they will be paying more attention to the work that indigenous people are are still doing today, as well as the philosophy and practices they have kept alive to protect the sacred earth and her waters.
@Bluebelle sent me this poem today which I would like to share here. Thank you, beautiful Bluebelle.
“I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.
Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes
I would like to paint my body red and go into
the glittering snow
to die.
His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.
After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say
his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway
this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.”
― Mary Oliver
@jeanne-mayell. As soon as I read this poem, I thought of you. It touched my heart deeply.
@bluebelle There is something strange and interesting that you posted a poem about Tecumsah and that Mary Oliver's poem of him should end with a reference to his anger.
Two years ago, a Native American woman spoke at an event in our town to promote the book she'd written about Native American history. During the Q&A, she got testy with the overwhelmingly white but very respectful audience. Someone asked her what she wanted for her people, and she snapped, "We just want to be left alone!" I did not understand her answer nor did I like her beating up on a respectful gentle audience. But afterwards a woman I had considered to be a friend looked at me solemnly and said with some bitterness, "She reminds me of you."
I was hurt by this comparison. Another friend at our table looked concerned and said she disagreed with the comparison. This criticism has festered like a sting in my heart for two years, until I read that poem today.
My primary spirit guide is a Native American shaman; the woodlands my sanctuary, the trees my friends. Perhaps that anger is for the trauma that was inflicted upon them and upon the land they treated so tenderly for 20,000 years. Perhaps that anger will continue to burn like a flame within.
@jeanne-mayell After four years of a presidency espousing racism and white supremacy, our country is waking up to an awful truth: our racism has always been part of the national fabric. It has been swept under the rug, so to speak, where it festered and exploded in our consciousness over the past four years. This utterly destroys the myth of American exceptionalism. I’m sorry your friend didn’t understand your passion and your anger on behalf of Native Americans. The injustices of the past are not in the past at all; these injustices created generational trauma in the lives of Native Americans that continues to this day. If we are going to acknowledge the legacy of racism that has been handed down generation by generation, we ought to include our nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans in that reckoning, too.
@bluebelle COVID was necessary for the US to change and to expose the weakness within. Things will change for the better. I remembered the reading from you about this would be the new norm. My actions in life are a metaphor for the changes in the environment.
If you supported those protesting at Standing Rock, you should learn about Line 3.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/02/24/enbridge-line-3-divides-indigenous-lands-people
Line 3 is gaining news media attention. Now Jane Fonda is protesting ( what was old is new again) and the pipeline is being linked to sex trafficking and violence.
If you are not aware of what line 3 is, please look at the link above, google it or look at the link below. Water protectors have been attempting to protect this area for some time now an are finally gaining attention.
Things are being brought to the Light ... exposed... we can not heal what is not acknowledged. Admitting there IS a problem and making all aware of it is a first step to solving the situations/problems. Come on Light!!
A beautiful story about the Yurok Tribe in Northern California and the California Condor. They will create a captive breeding facility in Redwood national park for the birds who could be released to fly freely in the Pacific Northwest skies as early as this fall for the first time in a century.
The condor once soared from British Columbia to Mexico, but habitat loss, overhunting and, most significantly, poisoning from hunting ammunition drove the birds to near extinction.
By the early 1980s, these threats had caused such a precipitous decline in the population that only 22 remained in the wild. In an effort to regrow their numbers, biologists captured the remaining birds and began a breeding program
There are currently 300 California Condors who dwell in Central and Southern California, Utah and Arizona. This will mark their first reintroduction to N. California.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/26/california-condor-reintroduced-yurok-tribe
Canada’s supreme court decision on the Sinixt people could affirm hunting rights for tens of thousands
But Desautel and others in his community in Washington state have long argued that they are descendants of the Sinixt, an Indigenous people whose territory once spanned Canada and the United States.
On Friday, Canada’s highest court agreed, ruling that Desautel and the 4,000 other members of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state were successors to the Sinixt – and as a result, that they enjoy constitutionally protected Indigenous rights to hunt their traditional lands in Canada.
The decision could recognize Canadian hunting and fishing rights for peoples in the United States whose traditional territory was north of the border. The ruling also raises questions over whether the nations whose members live in the US but have treaty rights in Canada need to be consulted over resource projects.
“My grandchildren and their children can look past that border crossing and say, ‘That’s what we began right there.’ And now they can cross that imaginary line and visit the territories of our ancestors,” he said.
“They can see all the adversities their ancestors faced – the logging, mining and smallpox – and know they’re the byproduct of that survivability.”
More at the link below.
More news about LINE 5.This is really something to watch.
The Bay Mills Indian Community tribal council voted to banish Enbridge’s Line 5 pipelines from the reservation as well as lands and waters of their ceded territory as efforts grow to fight the controversial Michigan project.
The resolution approved by the tribe’s executive council on Monday, May 10, comes on the eve of a shutdown order issued by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that would terminate the company’s 1953 easement to cross the lakebed under the Straits of Mackinac.
Whitmer ordered the pipeline to stop running at midnight Wednesday, May 11, and said Tuesday in a letter to Enbridge officials that any profits generated after the deadline would belong to the state of Michigan.
According to a statement issued by the tribe, the Treaty of 1836 has reserved the right for tribal citizens to hunt, fish and gather in ceded territory for all time. This includes the waters of Lake Superior, Huron and Michigan which comprise the Straits of Mackinac.
"Enbridge's continued harm to our treaty rights, our environment, our history, our citizens, and our culture, is a prime example of how banishment should be used," said President Whitney Gravelle of the Bay Mills Executive Council in a written statement issued by the tribe.
More can be found here at this link:
https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/michigan-tribe-banishes-enbridge-line-5-pipeline
From Teen Vogue of all places. (Validation that our youth WILL indeed change and save the world).
I found this VERY interesting.
In an article about the Navajo Nation, also know as Dine` (accent about the e, I don't know how to type that) ) our youth are encouraged to become activists and pressure the US government to compensate Native communities for radiation poisoning. This is actually a big problem facing the Navajo Nation right now.
Our generation has the opportunity to break the cycle and catalyze a change in how the U.S. interacts with the Navajo Nation through the power of digital organizing. We are uniquely skilled at using social media to amplify disenfranchised voices. Starting a movement and using its momentum to lobby our representatives to renew RECA and expand it to cover all of the Diné impacted would make an immeasurable difference to so many. It’s our generation’s responsibility to help end the centuries-old cycle of oppressing Native Americans and then not providing reparations for the harm they have endured. People are dying and won’t stop dying; the least we can do is make sure they have the resources to not go bankrupt paying for medical care.
More found at the link below.
News out of Seattle about fighting the Line 3 pipeline.
Seattle, WA - On Monday May 10, 2021, the Seattle city council unanimously approved a joint statement supporting Tribal Nation’s efforts to halt the construction on the Line 3 tar sands pipeline.
In a letter addressing the Tribal Chairmen of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, the Seattle city council states that they are in, “support of your efforts to halt construction of the tar sands Line 3 pipeline. We recognize impacted Nations are fighting a long battle to decommission oil pipelines and to transition to renewable resources. This letter recognizes the harmful impacts of the oil industry on Native American community lifestyles, health, and sovereignty.”
Seattle becomes the first non-Tribal government to openly oppose the Line 3 pipeline. The Seattle city council previously supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access pipeline when they became the first city in the nation to divest from Wells Fargo due to their involvement with Energy Transfer Partners.
The statement, written by community activist Matt Remle (Lakota) and sponsored by council-member Debora Juarez (Blackfeet), will also be sent to the Biden Administration calling on them intervene and halt the construction of the pipeline.
The statement can be found at this link:
It still amazes me that many of our our water protectors are actually in need of water.
This bill being introduced into Congress might finally address some of the major water inequities that have happened to our Indigenous people in the U.S. Some like the Navajo and Hopi who haven't had access to clean water for over 40 years.
Water is life.
Two Democratic senators have introduced legislation that would dramatically scale up funding to build new water infrastructure in Indian Country, seeking to address a backlog of needed projects and finally bring clean drinking water to communities that have been living with scarcity and toxic contamination for generations.
The bill, introduced by Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, would provide about $6.7 billion for a variety of water infrastructure projects, the largest amount of additional funding to date to address the longstanding injustice of the lack of clean drinking water in many Indigenous communities across the country.
In a recent report, researchers with U.S. Water Alliance and DigDeep found that race is the "strongest predictor" of water access and that Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack complete plumbing.
"This is long overdue," Hopi Tribe Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma said in an interview. "We are First Nations here, yet we're the last nations to be really recognized. So it's just an imbalance in equity."
@lovendures I saw this story and am very pleased the injustice and remedy are being addressed.
I am thinking of you today and the AZ heavy rains. You are in AZ? How are you faring?
Thank you for asking!
It is so weird . The past few days have been VERY rainy. Flooded neighborhoods and streets just 4 miles from my house had a mess to deal with. The drought has been so bad for so long, we only just left the worst tier of drought t go down to the second worst tier. Last year we only had one day of monsoons. It was a non-soon year. The only I have experienced in the 27 years I have lived here. Of course some years are much more wet than others. This seems to be a very wet July. In June we baked in the heat and dry sun.
Our soil is such that a hard fast rain water doesn't really absorb into the soil Many monsoon type rains are powerful and streets can flood easily if they are intense. So far I haven't been worried about my house flooding. I am keeping an eye on my back yard which is the most likely cause of a potential flood as it slopes a bit towards the house and in years past has had collected water to my sliding glass door.
The sun is trying to come out right now. One thing that is nice is that for the past 2 days the high has been I the 80's, almost unheard of for July. We will be back in the 100's by Tuesday however.