Residents of San Juan Island, Washington, the original home of the Lummi, Samish and Songhees peoples, are raising money for the care and preservation of house posts that overlook the harbor in the port town of Friday Harbor.
The house posts were carved by noted artist Susan Point, Musqueam, and acquired by residents 10 years ago to publicly honor the indigenous heritage of the island. The house posts, titled Interaction, tell the story of the interdependence of humans and animals in caring for the environment that sustains them.
“From the time of its unveiling, Interaction has become a gathering place for islanders and visitors—especially children, awed by the sculpture’s size, engaging motif, and deep, colorful carvings,” Barbara Marrett writes, in an article posted to SanJuanJournal.com. “Because children are drawn to touching the cougar scratches on the woman’s leg, over the years the paint and wood [have] been worn down in this area and other places where they have been loved and climbed upon.”
‘Interaction’ house posts by Susan Point. Source: susanpoint.com.
Interaction, which cost $65,000 in 2004, is now estimated to be worth $400,000, according to Marrett.
The house posts will be restored and repainted by a team of artists from Point’s studio. A community/Tribal celebration will follow the completion. Questions: Linda@sjihome.com.
Tracy Rector/Longhouse Media The Heiltsuk First Nation is hosting 31 canoes from Pacific Northwest indigenous nations. That number was provided by the manager of the Paddle to Bella Bella Facebook page. Canoes arrived July 13; the week of cultural celebration continues through July 19.
En route to the territory of the Heiltsuk First Nation, pullers in the 2014 Canoe Journey traveled through territory so beautiful it will be impossible to forget: Rugged, forested coastlines; island-dotted straits and narrow, glacier-carved passages; through Johnstone Strait, home of the largest resident pod of orcas in the world, and along the shores of the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the largest remaining tracts of unspoiled temperate rainforest left in the world.
They also traveled waters that are increasingly polluted and under threat.
Pullers traveled the marine highways of their ancestors, past Victoria, British Columbia, which dumps filtered, untreated sewage into the Salish Sea. They traveled the routes that U.S. energy company Kinder Morgan plans to use to ship 400 tanker loads of heavy crude oil each year.
Canoes traveling from the north passed the inlets leading to Kitimat, where heavy crude from Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline would be loaded onto tankers bound for Asia, a project that Canada approved on June 17.
Canoes from the Lummi Nation near Bellingham passed Cherry Point, a sacred and environmentally sensitive area where Gateway Pacific proposes a coal train terminal; early site preparation was done without permits and desecrated ancestral burials.
Canoes from Northwest indigenous nations arrived in Bella Bella, British Columbia on July 13; the gathering continues until July 19 with cultural celebrations, a rally against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, and an indigenous economic summit. The ceremonies are being livestreamed online at Tribal Canoe Journeys 2014 :: Qatuwas Bella Bella.
Mike Williams Sr., chief of the Yupiit Nation and member of the board of First Stewards, noted that the Canoe Journey route calls attention to the fragile environment that’s at stake. First Stewards, an indigenous environmental advocacy group, will host a symposium on “Sustainability, Climate Change & Traditional Places” from July 21–23 in Washington, D.C.
“The Canoe Journey is a really big statement to us to hang onto our culture and our way of life, and to bind people together,” said Williams, who is also a well-known musher. “In the Iditarod, there are pristine places but there are also old mining towns [on the route] where we’re told not to drink the water.”
The parallels between the water issues encountered on the Iditarod and the Canoe Journey are unmistakable, he added.
“In the Canoe Journey, there are pristine waters and there are waters that contains toxic substances,” Williams said. “There’s oil and the continuous leaking of pipelines. It happens.”
Not only does it happen, but it does not go away. Prince William Sound has never totally recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Williams said. Likewise, he added, if the Northern Gateway pipeline, the coal trains and increased shipping come to fruition, an environmental disaster is inevitable.
“It’s going to happen,” Williams said. “There has to be total, thoughtful conversation for everyone—consider all the possible impacts. And there has to be meaningful consultation with the tribes. They have to weigh in on that. We’ve got to make it 100 percent fail-safe or don’t do it.”
The Heiltsuk First Nation’s hosting of the 2014 Canoe Journey included a rally against the Enbridge pipeline. Canoes arrived in Bella Bella, B.C., on July 13; the week of cultural celebration continues through July 19. (Photo: Tracy Rector/Longhouse Media)
State Senator John McCoy, D-Tulalip, is a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes. He is the ranking member of the Senate Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee, which focuses on such issues as climate change, water quality, toxic chemical use reduction and cleanup, and management of storm water and wastewater.
“I think the message is, pollution is occurring everywhere,” McCoy said of the takeaway from the Canoe Journey. “It’s a worldwide problem, and it needs to be addressed. If we keep polluting our water, we’re going to be in big trouble. Water is the essence of life.”
Canoes were underway for Bella Bella on July 9 as Governor Jay Inslee announced that he wants to increase the recommended fish-consumption rate in the state from 6.5 grams to 175 grams a day—that’s good news for indigenous peoples, for whom fish is important culturally, spiritually and as a food. But for 175 grams of fish to be considered safe to eat, businesses that pollute will have to conform to tougher pollution control standards.
Inslee’s plan for how toxic substances will be controlled in expected in December. It will require legislation, McCoy said.
Jewell James is coordinator of the Lummi Treaty Protection Task Force and a leader in the effort to prevent a coal train terminal from being built at Cherry Point, a sacred area for the Lummi people and an important spawning ground for herring, an important food for salmon.
James said environmental degradation is just part of a series of historical traumas set upon Indigenous Peoples: First, the diseases that came after contact; then the treaty era and the relocation to reservations; then the cultural and spiritual oppression of the boarding school era, and then the termination era.
“Yet we continue to exist,” James said. And the Canoe Journey, now in its 23rd year, has helped “revitalize and breathe new life into our cultural knowledge” given that journey gatherings are venues for the passing down of stories about how the ancestors lived in and cared for the environment that sustained them.
James hopes people on the Canoe Journey connect with and carry on those stories and values.
“There are messages in those stories,” he said. “And within those stories there are sacred symbols that mean something—that you have to be careful with what you do, and others have to be careful with what they do, to Mother Earth.”
Alabama Forestry Commission officials say firefighters from throughout the state are helping respond to wildfires in Oregon and Washington state.
Officials said in a release Tuesday that five firefighters have been sent to tackle wildfires in Oregon and two have been sent to battle a blaze in Washington State.
Alabama State Forester Greg Pate says Alabama Forestry Commission firefighters accepted a 16-day assignment through an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service and have previously helped fight western wildfires in recent years.
Forestry officials say Alabama has seen measurable rainfall this summer while many western states are faced with drought conditions. Officials say the dry conditions allow wildfires to quickly become difficult to control.
WORLEY, Idaho (AP) — A Native American tribe has canceled an Aug. 4 concert by Ted Nugent at its casino.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe on Monday said that the cancellation of the concert at the casino in the northwest Idaho city of Worley was because of the rocker’s “racist and hate-filled remarks.”
The tribe says it booked Nugent without realizing he espoused “racist attitudes and views.” The tribe did not detail which of Nugent’s specific views it opposes.
Officials for Nugent’s music management company were out of the office on Monday and not available for comment.
Nugent in the past has referred to President Barack Obama as a “subhuman mongrel.” Nugent later apologized “for using the street fight terminology of subhuman mongrel.” But he maintained that Obama was a “liar” violating the Constitution.
The drought in California is exacerbating the effect that illegal marijuana farms have on the Yurok ’s water supply, and on July 21 federal and state agencies raided several properties on or adjoining the reservation along the Klamath River.
The raid was conducted at Yurok officials’ request, the Los Angeles Times reported, and involved the California National Guard, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, California Department of Justice’ North State Marijuana Investigation Team, and Yurok police. Operation Yurok, as it was called, was coordinated by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Drug Enforcement Unit.
The Yurok are not the only ones contending with the effects of illegal pot grows on their lands. The Hoopa Tribe has been actively combating incursions as well.
Even without the ongoing and worsening drought, the farms put a strain on Yurok life in a number of ways. Rat poison kills sacred fish and other animals, lower water levels become too warm and unhealthy for salmon to spawn in, and water pressure is just about nil on the reservation.
“They’re stealing millions and millions of gallons of water, and it’s impacting our ecosystem,” Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke said during the raid, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We can no longer make it into our dance places, our women and children can’t leave the road to gather. We can’t hunt. We can’t live the life we’ve lived for thousands of years.”
Not only that, but access to one sacred ceremonial site is blocked by a pot farm, O’Rourke told the Los Angeles Times. And growers have become brazen enough to trundle supplies to and from the farms in broad daylight.
“We are coming close to being prisoners in our own land,” O’Rourke said. “Everything we stand for, everything we do is impacted.”
So far, more than 150 homes in Washington state have been destroyed in what veteran firefighters are calling the worst fire season in decades.
Fires have scorched thousands of acres of ranchland in southeast Oregon.
Credit Brooke Nyman / Oregon Cattleman’s Association
In neighboring Oregon, firefighters are stretched thin by more than a dozen blazes burning at once.
Veteran firefighter Al Lawson came to a community meeting in central Washington to meet with residents displaced by the raging Carlton Complex Fire. It’s among the largest wildfires in the state’s recorded history.
“In my 30 years, I’ve never seen fire behavior like this,” he said. “Nothing to compare.”
Governor Jay Inslee toured the devastation over the weekend. He called it an unprecedented firestorm.
“Our state is stretched beyond imagination,” he said.
Inslee says the fact that it’s only mid-July is an ominous sign.
“Typically the fire season doesn’t really get going until August,” he said. “So we have at least two more months in the fire season and we have already burned twice as many acres as the average.”
Oregon has been spared the same level of devastation in terms of lost property. But the Oregon Department of Forestry says so far the sheer number of acres burned this summer is seven times more than a typical fire season.
On a more positive note, the agency’s Cynthia Orlando says cooler weather for the next few days could help slow things down.
“We’re getting a lit bit of a respite but you know, everybody’s on alert here,” Orlando said.
Temperatures are expected to soar back into the 90s by the end of the week.
Washington is slowly moving ahead with a long-delayed plan to update its water quality rules. Tuesday’s will be the first public meeting on Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposal to dramatically increase the fish consumption rate, which determines how clean discharged water must be. But some say the proposal doesn’t go far enough.
The governor’s plan would increase the fish consumption rate to about a meal a day, rather than a meal a month. It would increase the current rate of 6.5 grams per day to 127 grams per day. That’s the same rate recently adopted by Oregon, which has the strictest rate in the country.
“Well, yes, but it’s important to remember that that’s just one part of this equation,” said Chris Wilke with Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, one of four groups that sued the federal government last year to force it to make the state comply with the Clean Water Act.
Wilke says the plaintiffs are glad to see a more realistic fish consumption rate. But at the same time, he points out that Inslee’s proposal also lowers the bar on the allowable risk for cancer by a factor of 10, from one in a million to one in 100,000.
“It appears the state has kind of engineered the standards to come out where they want them to be or where might be acceptable to business interests,” Wilke said.
The state Department of Ecology says the Governor felt the compromise is necessary, because businesses have warned tightening the standard too much would prompt them to move jobs elsewhere.
And instead of just cleaning up the aftermath, Inslee is pushing for additional policies to discourage use of the chemicals in the first place, to “shift people away from using these kinds of things that are so problematic for the permit holders,” said Carol Kraege, who leads the state Department of Ecology’s toxics reduction efforts.
But the plaintiffs who brought suit for cleaner water say such policies might not make it through the Legislature. And they say a similar compromise was recently put forward in Idaho and rejected by the Environmental Protection Agency.
A young orca captured in Penn Cove in 1970, which is believed to be Lolita, an orca that whale activists have been fighting to have set free in Puget Sound after 44 years in captivity at the Seaquarium in Miami. | credit: Dr. Terrell Newby
The resident killer whales of Puget Sound are an endangered species. There are about 80 of them left.
But there was a time, not too long ago, when people were catching these whales and selling them into captivity.
In the 1960s and ‘70s an estimated 35 orcas were taken from Puget Sound. 13 were killed in the process.
Sandra Pollard has documented the history of orca capture in Puget Sound in a new book: Puget Sound Whales For Sale: The Fight To End Orca Hunting.
She spoke with EarthFix’s Ashley Ahearn about this dark period in orca history.
Ashley Ahearn: Let’s go back in time here a little bit, why did people start catching orcas?
Sandra Pollard: I think there was probably an element of the trophy hunter there but also they didn’t like whales very much in those days, particularly the orcas, because they thought they were taking the salmon. And in the ‘60s the Navy used them as target practice for strafing runs and many of the whales that eventually turned up in marine parks had bullet holes in them.
So they were not respected. They were disliked. The people who did revere and respect them were the Native American people and they’re on their tribal crests and they looked up to them and they still do.
Ahearn: So it’s been almost 50 years since the first captive orca arrived in Seattle. Can you tell me about that whale and what happened, what was his story?
Pollard: That’s correct. The first whale was called Namu and a man called Ted Griffin had an aquarium down in Seattle, the Seattle Marine Aquarium, and he’d always wanted to have a killer whale and two whales actually washed up in British Columbia at Warrior Cove. They got caught in nets when a couple of fishermen abandoned their nets to get away from a storm. So they had two whales up there. One a bull and one a calf. The calf escaped but unfortunately the bull did not.
So Ted Griffin flew up to Warrior Cove and secured the whale, but then of course, he had to get it back to Seattle. So, with the help of fishermen, he built a three-sided pen with a net on one side and steel bars on the other and they brought Namu, as he was then called, down to Seattle in that three-sided pen. That was a 400-mile journey which took 18 days, and made a glorious entrance into Seattle to go-go dancers and great jubilation. But at the same time there were people there who didn’t like what they were seeing and there were protesters waiting with “Save The Whales” signs even back then. But that was how it all started.
Ahearn: And there was a Canadian biologist who went along for the trip and he describes the separation of Namu from his family. Can you read that section?
Pollard: Yes. The biologist was called Gil Hewlett and this is what he had to say.
“When they are within 300 yards of the pen, Namu lets out a terrifying squeal, almost like a throttled cat. He leaps out of the water and crashes against the left corner of the pen. There is terrific thrashing and he is making all kinds of sounds. Then they are there again, the same family of the cow and two calves. They came straight up behind the pen to about 10 feet away, tremendous squealing going on. Namu seemed to lose all coordination in the pen. He kept getting swept against the cargo net and swimming vigorously forward. The family unit circles around towards the end of the pen.”
Ahearn: Now the family unit follows him a certain distance but then they stop. What happens?
Pollard: Yes the female and the two calves follow him to an area called Seymour Narrows up in British Columbia near Campbell River and then they gradually fell back. And it has been found that the Seymour Narrows area is really the dividing line between the northern residents and the southern residents.
Ahearn: What was the public sentiment around orcas that were being captured and taken into captivity for entertainment? How were people responding at the time?
Pollard: For the most part I think they were thrilled to see this exotic creature up close and personal and impressed by the abilities it had because they are such intelligent creatures that they learn tricks for food. But I think the general consensus was more one of wonder. But there were still those creeping suspicions that this wasn’t right.
Ahearn: It seems that in terms of public sentiment changing about orca capture the most notorious, the most well known capture, occurred in Penn Cove on Whidbey Island in 1970. Can you tell me what happened on that day?
Pollard: That was on either August the 7th or 8th, 1970 and the three pods of Southern Resident orcas known as J,K and L were going north, probably back to the San Juan Islands, and Ted Griffen and Don Goldsbury and the capture team they went out in boats and started to turn them back towards Whidbey Island and the idea was to drive them into Holmes Harbor, which is a sheltered place on Whidbey Island. And they used seal bombs, which are loud explosive devices. And they also used buzzing aircraft.
But they didn’t get them into Holmes Harbor. The whales are very clever and they brought in their diversionary tactics. The mothers and the calves headed up for Deception Pass and the males did a decoy action by going in the opposite direction. But it was too late. The boats outstripped them and they turned the mothers and the calves back and drove about 100 whales into Penn Cove on Whidbey Island. And they were held there in nets until they went through the selection process, which would be to corral the mothers away from the calves and split them up, because it was the calves that they wanted. They were smaller. They easier to transport. And they were easier to train.
The capture net pens in Penn Cove on Whidbey Island 1970.
And the rest of the whales that were turned away that they didn’t want, they stayed around. They’re a family unit. They’re highly social and they stay together for life. There is no dispersal, other than by death or human interference. So those whales stayed with the whales in the capture pens and eventually seven whales were selected for marine parks, which were already waiting around the world. Four calves were drowned and there also had been a female who had died. She had charged the net to try to get to her calf, so she also died during the process, as well. And this caused an uproar and a lot of feeling against the captures. And that started to be the turning point.
And the last whale to be taken from Penn Cove was Lolita and she remains at the Miami Seaquarium where she has been for 44 years.
Ahearn: Sandra, when did we stop taking orcas out of Puget Sound to sell to marine parks around the world?
Pollard: We stopped doing that in March, 1976 when six orca were driven into Olympia and the seal bombs were used and it caused a great hue and cry. There were protesters on the water. There were protesters on land. And there was a lawsuit, as well. So after a couple of weeks there were only two whales left because three had escaped. One had been turned away because it was too big and the two whales were turned over to the University of Washington to be radio tagged and tracked for as long as possible. I don’t think they were tracked for very long, but there was a lawsuit which stopped the captures in Washington state and Seaworld were not able to come back into Washington state and capture orca again and that was the last capture in Washington state.
Ahearn: So really the end of a very dark era for the orca in Puget Sound.
Pollard: It certainly was. And one wonders if that hadn’t happened how much longer the captures would have continued and how many more whales we would have lost.
Sandra Pollard is the author of Puget Sound Whales for Sale: The Fight To End Orca Hunting. You can find out about upcoming stops on her Northwest book tour here.
The conventional wisdom on climate change is that the issue is politically toxic. But it turns out the American people may be prepared for the kind of enormous undertaking that would be required to stem the catastrophic effects of climate change — including unilateral action by the U.S. government.
Last month, the Yale University Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication published “Politics and Global Warming,“ a massive survey of 860 registered voters on the subject of the government’s role in fighting climate change. While the results appear to confirm that there is still a strong partisan divide on the issue, there is, as the report authors state, “much more going on beneath the surface.”
Perhaps the most crucial finding is that 62 percent of respondents are not content to have the U.S. wait on the sidelines unless and until other nations commit to emissions cuts. All but the most conservative of respondents said the U.S. should reduce its emissions “regardless of what other countries do.” Climate change skeptics have long argued that anything the U.S. does will not count for much if large polluters like India and China do not also take steps to curtail their carbon output. The Obama administration has argued that the U.S. has to exhibit leadership on emissions cuts (most recently through Environmental Protection Agency rules on existing and new power plants), and that the U.S.’s credibility at forthcoming climate talks in Paris rests on a demonstration of American commitment.
The poll numbers suggest many Americans intuitively understand this. The partisan breakdown is intriguing: While Democrats (especially liberals) are solidly behind this flavor of American unilateralism, Republicans are divided: 57 percent of self-described liberal and moderate Republicans would support that effort.
The poll also suggested fairly wide acceptance of several other benefits of emissions reductions, including public health improvements, energy self-sufficiency, and poverty reduction. There is fairly broad agreement that taking steps to reduce global warming will “[p]rovide a better life for our children and grandchildren,” a catch-all statement that indicates Americans are willing to make some sacrifices now in exchange for benefits down the line.
More concretely, most people seem to buy into the EPA’s argument that its emissions reduction plans will have public health benefits (54 percent total; 72 percent among Democrats and 46 percent among Republicans), an improvement from a previous Bloombergpoll that asked the same question.
Many Americans also look forward to climate action reducing dependence on foreign oil (55 percent total), though so far there is no climate-related public policy intervention in the offing that would drastically reduce oil consumption. The EPA regulations affect power plants, very few of which are oil-fueled, and our declining oil imports over the past half decade can largely be attributed to domestic drilling efforts, especially extraction of tight and shale oil. The polling suggests, however, that the American people closely correlate the end-result of climate action with energy security.
The only result that may give climate hawks pause was the benefit that polled as the least popular: That addressing climate change would improve U.S. national security. Even among liberal Democrats, it is not an easy sell (47 percent); it does not even break 30 percent with moderate or conservative Democrats and only 24 percent for Republicans as a whole. Previous studies show that adopting this frame is unlikely to convince conservatives to take climate change seriously (David Roberts has written previously on the “boomerang effect” of such arguments). Indeed, only on poverty reduction is there less agreement than national security improvement.
The belief that climate change and national security are not interrelated is prevalent despite repeated warnings from the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. As The Week‘s Ryan Cooper put it in a recent piece, the imperatives for risk management and self-preservation with regard to climate change are understood very well among the military. There are two points worth making about this.
The first is that it is a relatively novel and recent development to think about climate change in national security terms. People typically think of climate change as an environmental problem, rather than a security one, so it is no surprise that saving plant and animal species and preventing destruction of life scores much higher. Additionally, aside from military responses to natural disasters — such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2013 typhoon that devastated parts of the Philippines — there is no headline event that would cause people to link climate and national security.
The second point is that, on some level, the fact that public opinion is not catching up with some sectors of elite opinion is not necessarily an immediate cause for concern. That the argument is not making inroads with Main Street is less of a problem than it not influencing policy in executive departments. While Congress has abdicated its responsibility on climate change legislation, the Obama administration has been pro-active.
Still, what these findings suggest is that the steady drumbeat of analysis on climate change is having a positive effect. People are generally aware there is a problem, and are generally supportive of policies to fight it, even going so far as to say the U.S. can strike out ahead of other countries. People also recognize that benefits will accrue in such a way as to eventually justify the cost. While there is still a motivated minority resisting these findings, the Yale–George Mason report confirms they are nothing more than that: A minority.
WASHINGTON, DC – President Obama announced this morning that the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has committed to lead a Native American Task Force to advance the important work of the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative. NCAI is proud to have the following organizations join our initial team of partners for this task force: Center for Native American Youth, Native American Boys and Girls Clubs of America, National Indian Child Welfare Association, National Indian Education Association, and UNITY Inc. This task force will coordinate and serve as the central point for sharing important work, opportunities, and resources for our youth. Included in the task force’s initial work plan, is the Native Youth Resilience Project and First Kids 1st Initiative.
Indian Country has a shared responsibility to address the issues facing our children and families. NCAI urges other interested partners to join this task force to strengthen opportunities for our Native youth.
NCAI President Brian Cladoosby released the following statement, “The National Congress of American Indians and its partners in the task force look forward to working with the White House on this important initiative. Our tribal nations’ most important resource and responsibility are our Native youth. We must work hard every day to enhance opportunities and create better lives for our younger generations and generations yet to come.”
