SPOKANE, Wash. — The federal government on Wednesday downgraded the protected status of the last remaining herd of mountain caribou in the Lower 48 states from endangered to threatened. Environmental groups hailed the decision as good for the animals.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made the change in response to petitions from Idaho’s Bonner County, a snowmobile group and a pro-business law firm that had sought the removal of all protections from the herd in northern Idaho.
The herd is thought to number fewer than 30 animals but interacts with a much-larger herd on the Canadian side of the Selkirk Mountains.
The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group seeking to protect the herd, said the decision means the animals will continue to get the protection they need.
“We’re just glad they stayed protected,” said Noah Greenwald of the center. “As far as the protections a species gets, the difference between endangered and threatened is not substantial.”
The decision came in response to a petition from the Pacific Legal Foundation, Bonner County and the Idaho State Snowmobile Association, which said the herd in the U.S. was too small a subset of animals to warrant listing.
“We think it is a partial victory,” said Jonathan Wood, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California.
The downgrade in status may lift some of the most severe restrictions on activities in caribou habitat, Wood said.
“The severe burden on property owners and Bonner County and people interested in recreation may get greater flexibility,” he said.
Woodland caribou once ranged across much of the nation’s northern tier. However, the animals disappeared 100 years ago from all but a small and remote area of the Idaho Panhandle and northeastern Washington.
The population has been protected since 1983 under the Endangered Species Act.
“Scientists from both sides of the border have determined southern mountain caribou are significant and need protection to survive,” said Jason Rylander, attorney for Defenders of Wildlife. “We should not allow these unique animals to go extinct in the United States.”
All caribou are the same species, but mountain caribou have adapted to harsh winters with deep snow by developing dinner-plate sized hooves that work like snowshoes. They eat only arboreal lichens during the winter months.
The Pacific Legal Foundation argued that caribou should not be protected because there are plenty in Canada. But environmentalists countered that the Endangered Species Act specifically allows protection of distinct populations.
“The woodland caribou is Idaho’s most endangered animal. It is important that they remain protected and we get down to the real work of recovery before they go extinct,” said Brad Smith of the Idaho Conservation League.
Conservation groups have sued for the establishment of protected critical habitat and to close a large area of the Selkirks to snowmobiles, which pose a threat to the animals.
The Fish and Wildlife Service originally set aside more than 375,000 acres of critical habitat, but pro-business groups complained that would decimate the economy of the area. The habitat was eventually reduced to about 30,000 acres, a decision that remains in litigation.
A graduate student in the marine biology program at Cal State Long Beach collects kelp in the waters off of Long Beach during Kelp Watch 2014’s initial collection of samples. (Photo credit: David J. Nelson/Cal State Long Beach)
May 7, 2014
Tom Reopelle CBS Los Angeles
LONG BEACH (CBSLA.com) — The West Coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean-borne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, scientists said Wednesday.
KNX 1070′s Tom Reopelle reports researchers from CSU Long Beach and other schools are sampling kelp along the California coastline to determine whether seawater arriving from Japan poses any public health threat.
The Kelp Watch 2014 project – which is co-headed by Dr. Steven Manley, marine biology professor at Long Beach State – has gathered kelp samples from as far north as Kodiak Island, Alaska, to as far south as Baja California to determine the extent of possible radiation contamination from the Fukushima disaster in March 2011.
During the first phase of the project, samples were primarily collected from Feb. 24 through March 14 at 38 of the 44 sites originally identified by researchers for testing of cesium-137 and -134 isotopes, according to researchers.
“So far, it appears that, based on our analysis of kelp, that none of the Fukushima radiation has arrived via the ocean current to our shoreline,” Manley said.
Two sites in the tropics – Hawaii and Guam, where non-kelp brown algae were sampled — were also negative for Fukushima radiation, according to researchers.
Manley noted that the project also has giant kelp from off the coast of Chile in South America that serves as a reference site, far removed from any potential influence from Fukushima.
The study somewhat contradicted earlier findings from a 2012 Long Beach State study that found low levels of radioactive isotopes in seaweed found along the southern Pacific Coast.
While the project’s participants are primarily from academia who have agreed to work pro bono, donors with the USC-Sea Grant and California State University Council on Ocean Affairs, Science & Technology (COAST) have agreed to contribute funds to the project, researchers said.
The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July.
A national report released Tuesday says climate change will make it increasingly difficult for the Northwest to generate hydropower and protect salmon at the same time.
The Northwest gets 75 percent of its electricity from dams. As climate change reduces summer stream flows, the Northwest Climate Assessment report says the result will likely be less hydropower production from those dams – with reductions of up to 20 percent by 2080.
The reductions would be necessary to preserve stream flows for threatened and endangered fish, according to Amy Snover, director of the Climate Impacts Group and co-lead author of the Northwest report. Snover says with climate change leaving less water in rivers during the summer, what’s left will have to be divided between storage for hydropower and flows for fish.
“It will be increasingly difficult to meet the two goals of producing summer and fall hydropower and maintaining sufficient flows in the river for protected and endangered fish,” she said. “You can reduce some of the negative impacts on hydropower production but you can’t do that and maintain the fish flows.”
Snover says her report’s projections are based on the way the Northwest operates hydroelectric dams right now. But that could change. Regional power managers say climate change is leading them to reconsider how they will operate dams in the future.
John Fazio, an analyst with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, says climate change is going to shift demand for electricity in the region, too.
Winters will be warmer, so people will need less power than before at a time of year when there’s lots of water in the rivers. And as summers get hotter, there will be more need for power to cool people off at a time of year when there’s less water available to generate hydropower.
Fazio has been thinking about the best way to manage the hydro system under these climate change scenarios. He’s suggested using other sources of power in the winter to make sure the system’s reservoirs are full of water by summertime.
“My suggestion would be during the summer we could pull more water from reservoirs to make up for decrease in summer flows and then going into the winter, use generation from other sources to meet our (power) loads and let the reservoirs refill,” he said.
“It would call for a change in the whole approach to how we operate the hydro system,” Fazio said. “So far it hasn’t gotten any traction anywhere. It’s a complicated issue, but we’re trying to tackle it.”
Bonneville Power Administration, which manages 31 dams in the Columbia River Basin and distributes most of the electricity in the Northwest, has been pondering the issue of climate change as well. It’s developed a road map for adapting to climate change and launched pilot projects to model the effects of climate change on stream flows in the Columbia River Basin.
YAKIMA, Wash. — The Yakama Nation Tribal Court ruled it has jurisdiction in an unprecedented lawsuit that maintains that the state has responsibility to manage an elk herd to prevent damage to a sacred burial site.
Chief Judge Ted Strong found in favor of the tribal member who brought the civil suit against the state Department of Fish and Wildlife when he ruled Friday that the Tribal Court has the authority to hear the case. He ordered the parties to discuss settlement options before continuing with hearings.
Attorneys for the state had asked the court to throw out the lawsuit, saying it lacked authority over Wildlife Department officials named in the suit because they are not tribal members and because the burial site is not on the reservation.
In the case of the burial sites, the judge found that the court’s jurisdiction should not be limited to the reservation.
The case was brought under a 1989 state law allowing tribal members to seek damages in civil court against those who have knowingly damaged Indian burial sites. The law allows cases to be brought in Superior or Tribal Court, but this is the first time a case has been heard in Tribal Court.
It’s a test case for the authority of the Tribal Court, said Jack Fiander, the attorney representing Shay-Ya-Boon-Il-Pilpsh, who brought the case. Fiander said he hopes this case can demonstrate the fair, professional process of the Tribal Court.
Typically, tribal courts only have jurisdiction over cases involving tribal members and tribal lands.
“The Yakama Tribal Member who seeks preservation of the ancient burial grounds has no less right to be heard by this court simply because the remains of his fellow Yakama lies buried in the grave some miles distant from the Yakama Reservation Boundary,” Judge Strong wrote in the order granting the jurisdiction.
The tribal court is “uniquely competent” to hear concerns about the desecration of burial sites, he wrote.
Plaintiff Shay-Ya-Boon-Il-Pilpsh, who is also known as Ricky Watlamet, is charged in Kittitas County Superior Court with felony unlawful hunting after allegedly shooting several of the elk on the Kittitas County property where the burial site is located.
He was invited by the nontribal landowner who was frustrated with the Wildlife Department’s response to her complaints about damage by the elk, which were also eating grasses intended for cattle.
But under state law, tribal members’ treaty hunting rights that allow them to hunt outside of the state-set seasons don’t apply on private land.
Fiander is also representing his client in the criminal case, but he said that he’s encouraged by the Tribal Court’s decision to hear this civil case.
“I think everybody’s pleased about the decision, but we see it as chapter three of about seven,” Fiander said.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that in less than a month as the snow melts that the elk will start leaving the property and hopefully, a settlement can be reached for next year.”
In other areas with elk problems, Fiander said management strategies have included temporary fencing or issuing more hunting permits to keep the herd smaller.
A spokeswoman for the state Attorney General’s Office, which represents the Wildlife Department, said in an email that it is “reviewing the decision with our clients and considering our course of action.”
The next hearing is set for June 19, after the parties meet to discuss settlement options.
Once the Tribal Court has reached a conclusion in the case, the decision can be subject to a federal court review to ensure the process was fair, Fiander said.
But, he said he would not be surprised if the state’s attorneys planned to appeal.
“My sense is that ultimately it will end up in federal court,” Fiander said.
Turning on the lights or opening the fridge are things many of us take for granted. But if you’ve never had electricity, they might seem like luxuries. Now, for dozens of families on the Navajo Nation, those luxuries are becoming a reality. As Arizona Public Radio’s Aaron Granillo reports, more than 60 families will soon have electricity for the first time in their lives.
Margie Tso has a beautiful view from her family ranch on the Navajo Nation, just southeast of Page.
“I have been living out here since 1952,” said Tso.
The view from the Tso’s ranch of LeChee Rock, a sacred mountain to the Navajo people.
Credit Aaron Granillo
From her front yard, you can see miles and miles of red and orange sandstone. And LeChee Rock, a sacred mountain to the Navajo people. But from the backyard, there’s a clear view of the Navajo Generating Station, which has been supplying electricity all over the southwest since 1976. But not to Tso’s house.
“At times we kind of grumbled about it, but what could we do? I was brought up in the same matter that I learned to deal with,” said Tso. “Building a fire out of wood, using the charcoal for everything. Making bread, cooking meat, making stew, and such and such.”
But all of that has changed because of a nearly $5 million joint project that’s bringing electricity to certain areas of the Navajo Nation, including Tso’s ranch.
“It’s sort of a miracle for people to live like that,” said Tso. “Flip on a light. Get your remote. Your pleasure’s right there before you.”
Smoke stacks at the Navajo Generating Station can be seen from the Tso’s ranch.
Credit Aaron Granillo
Although the Navajo Generating Station has been producing electricity for decades, it’s not legally allowed to provide power to the Navajo Nation. That ownership and sovereignty belongs to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority. But according to officials, they’ve never had enough money to build power poles in remote parts of the reservation. That is until now.
“The Navajo Generating Station and SRP donated about $2 million. NTUA donated some,” said Paul Begay, a business information technician with NGS.
Additional funding came from the Navajo Nation Abandoned Mine Lands program and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By 2015, the project will bring electricity to 63 families.
“The first thing people mention is refrigerator. ‘Oh good, I’m not going to buy any more ice,'” Begay said.
Using ice to keep food fresh is what Pearl Begay did for decades. She lives just up the road from Tso’s ranch. Pearl only speaks native Navajo, so her daughter, Daisy, translates.
“She said she like her electric. The lights mostly, and her refrigerator.” said Daisy.
According to Daisy and Pearl, they should have had power a long time ago. They claim they were promised electricity nearly 40 years ago, while the Navajo Generating Station was being built.
“They built the plant right there, and they forget them,” said Daisy.
Their neighbor, Margie Tso, feels the same way.
“They started giving us hope, giving us hope,” said Tso. “And then they say, ‘It’s going to cost too much.’ And so then I just lost hope. I thought, ‘Well, whatever. I guess I won’t have electricity at the ranch.’”
But now that she does, life has become much easier.
“(It will) be quicker to do things than trying to hook up this and that, or run out of gas and run to town to get more gas,” said Tso. “A miracle happened that it came through.”
Tongass Conservation Society The headwaters of the Unuk River, where a company called KSM wants to build a humongous open-pit mine for cold, copper and other metals.
It has become an all-too-familiar story: Pristine waters. Salmon habitat. Sacred significance. Mining.
The Unuk River watershed, straddling the border between British Columbia and Alaska, is on track to become ground zero in a struggle to stop the world’s largest open-pit mine, Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell (KSM). The fight against it is uniting First Nations and Alaska Natives as they battle to preserve stewardship of the pristine region. And it is just one of five massive projects proposed for the region.
If KSM secures the financing and the regulatory go-ahead, the giant mine would turn 6,500 acres of pristine land into an industrial zone that would generate more than 10 billion pounds of copper and 38 million ounces of gold, according to a project summary. As with any large mine, it would employ a hefty workforce—in this case mostly Canadians—and create taxes and royalty payments for Canada. But it would also produce a slew of waste. And that’s what critics say downstream Alaska communities stand to take on: none of the economic benefits but much of the environmental risk.
With its remote headwaters in British Columbia, the Unuk River is one of the world’s most prolific salmon waters. An international river, the Unuk flows into neighboring Southeast Alaska and its temperate rainforest, the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest, a place of towering coastal mountains, tidewater glaciers and fog-shrouded islands. The Unuk empties into Misty Fjords National Monument, an attraction for cruise ship passengers viewing glaciers, bears and whales that dot Alaska’s Inside Passage. The Unuk, known as Joonáx̱ in Tlingit, supports large runs of king salmon, a cultural icon prized by commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen alike.
“The consequences for salmon runs on both sides of the border could be devastating, yet Alaskans would see none of the economic benefit,” wrote National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Michael Fay in a 2011 letter to British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, signed by nearly 40 other scientists.
Seabridge Gold, the mine developer, expects KSM to generate more than two billion tons of acidic waste rock called tailings, a byproduct of the mining process than can be lethal to fish. The tailings would be held behind two huge dams—each taller than the Hoover dam—built in the headwaters of the Nass River, one of British Columbia’s most important salmon rivers.
Because KSM is located in sensitive fish habitat, it has raised the ire of Southeast Alaska tribes, fishermen and some Canadian First Nations. They joined forces in early April, forming a cross-border working group to develop a unified strategy to protect their interests.
It’s not just KSM that worries them. KSM is one of more than a dozen mines planned for northern B.C., including five located in salmon-bearing watersheds that arise in Canada and drain into Alaska. The British Columbia government is encouraging the mines’ development, offering tax breaks and relaxed environmental rules. Also spurring development is the construction of a new power line extending electricity into the northwest corner of the province, bordering Alaska. The transboundary projects include Red Chris, Schaft Creek, Galore Creek and Tulsequah Chief. The international rivers they could affect are the Taku, Stikine and Unuk, some of Southeast Alaska’s top salmon rivers.
“These projects could not be in a worse location. Salmon is our traditional food. If anything happens to them, we would be in a world of hurt,” said Ketchikan fisherman and tribal leader Rob Sanderson Jr.
Fishing, seafood processing and tourism are key economic drivers in Southeast Alaska. The seafood industry produced $641 million worth of fish in 2011, which created 17,500 jobs and $468 million in wages. A million visitors tour the area every year, spending about copy billion.
Tribes have passed numerous resolutions of concern about how KSM and the other transboundary mines could potentially contaminate the region, including their traditional fishing grounds. Recently a delegation of tribal leaders and fishermen flew to Washington, D.C. to lobby for State Department intervention. They delivered a letter signed by 40 businesses, groups and individuals asking for help.
Alaska’s congressional delegation got the message. Shortly after the Alaskans flew home, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich, along with Congressman Don Young, contacted the office of Secretary of State John Kerry by letter asking him to get involved to protect Alaska’s interests. Because the mines are located in Canada, Alaska tribes feel they have less influence over the outcome than if they were on U.S. soil.
“It’s happening in a foreign country. We don’t have a lot of control over it,” said Sanderson. “They don’t even have to consult with Alaska tribes.”
The U.S. Environmental Protect Agency has raised issues regarding the KSM project, mirroring the tribes’ concerns. The U.S Interior Department has urged Seabridge Gold to consult with Alaska tribes regarding fishing and clean water.
Recently Seabridge sent its vice president for environmental affairs to Alaska to participate in a tribal meeting on Prince of Wales Island near Ketchikan regarding KSM. Seabridge’s Brent Murphy told the Juneau Empire that “the overwhelming design philosophy for the KSM project is the protection of downstream environments and that is ensuring protection also for Alaskans.”
On its website, Seabridge notes that KSM has undergone extensive review by environmental and technical experts over the past five years to see that salmon and other wild resources are protected.
But Seabridge’s assurances have done little to allay skepticism on the U.S. side. Since the meeting on Prince of Wales in late March, the newly elected president of Alaska’s largest tribe, the Juneau-based Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, has elevated the matter.
“This is a direct threat to the lifestyle and culture of our tribes’ 29,000-plus members,” said Richard Peterson, tribal president.
At Peterson’s urging, the Central Council adopted a resolution giving Southeast Alaska’s 19 federally recognized tribes the green light to work with First Nations to try to slow the development of the transboundary mines.
“We need a collective call to arms,” said Peterson.
Not all B.C. First Nations oppose the KSM mine or the other transboundary projects. The Gitxsan and Nisga’a Nations support the mine’s development. But others, including the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, who live downstream from where the KSM waste facility would be located, are opposed.
“Nass River fish are critical for the food security of the Gitanyow,” said Kevin Koch, a fish and wildlife biologist with Gitanyow Fisheries Authority. “KSM poses a major threat to the Gitanyow way of life.”
Koch noted that the Gitanyow have constitutionally protected aboriginal rights to fish in the Nass. Seabridge maintains that any ill effects from mine waste on Nass River salmon would be minimal.
Peterson is unconvinced.
“I think John Kerry should be sitting in my office talking to me right now,” he said. “We need face-to-face consultation on this. We’re a sovereign nation.”
Dana Fast Horse carries posters at the American Civil Liberties Union press conference in Rapid City on March 21, 2013. Families and tribes claim that temporary custody hearings were too short and violated rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. Court reporters who produced the transcripts during the hearings have until June 1 to produce the files. Photo/ Rapid City Journal
By Andrea J. Cook, Rapid City Journal By the end of the month, attorneys representing Native American families and two tribes in a federal child welfare case will know more about what happened during hearings that gave the Department of Social Services temporary custody of children.The Oglala Sioux and Rosebud tribes took the lead for three parents in a class action lawsuit challenging the practices of the 7th Circuit Court, the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s office and the Department of Social Services during temporary custody hearings that must take place within 48 hours of removing a child from a home. The parents claim the Indian Child Welfare Act hearings are too brief, sometimes as short as two minutes, and violate parental rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.
In mid-March, U.S. Chief District Judge Jeffrey Viken granted the tribe’s request for transcripts of more than 100 of the hearings, which are referred to as 48-hour hearings. He gave the judges who presided over the hearings two weeks to order transcripts of the hearings.
Those confidential hearings are at the heart of the plantiffs’ case, which contends that children are frequently taken from their homes for 60 days after hearings that often last no more than two minutes.
Presiding 7th Circuit Judge Judge Jeff Davis ordered transcripts of his hearings. Judges Wally Eklund, Thomas Trimble, Craig Pfeifle and Robert Mandel did not order transcripts.
The judges claimed Viken’s order threatens the distribution of authority between state and federal courts.
Transcripts were also not forthcoming from hearings held in front of former Judge Mary Thorstenson.
Last week, Viken chose to circumvent the judges’ reluctance to order the transcripts by ordering the court reporters who recorded the hearings to produce the transcripts. They have until June 1 to produce the transcripts.
The plaintiffs will have to pay for the transcripts that will be treated as confidential.
“Production of the 48-hour ICWA hearing transcripts is critical to the resolution of the issues in this case,” Viken said in his order.
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press The dried-out bed of Lake Mendocino, California, in February 2014. The state is gripped in its worst drought in recorded history, and a new study has found that climate change is to blame.
It is no secret that American Indian communities are at the forefront of climate change. From low-lying nations facing sea-level rise, to villages located on melting permafrost, to drought-plagued lands, these are some of the more dramatic examples of American Indian tribes that are taking a direct hit from extreme weather events likely linked to climate change. Although several tribes, including some on this list, are already adapting or laying out plans for the inevitable, this list highlights those that are seeing dramatic, tangible changes.
The Hoh road to the beach has washed out, and the ocean has destroyed the homes that once lined their beach. In 2009, Hog tribal officials told a U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., that they face constant threats from floods and the Hoh River.
Seaside villages up and down the Pacific coast are at risk, from rising sea levels. Some stark evidence of this came with the recent state of emergency declared by the Quinault Indian Nation. Earlier this year, its headquarters in Taholah faced an increasingly dangerous situation with sea level rise and intensified storms. The situation came to a head with the breach of a sea wall that caused serious damage.
The Quileute are squeezed on a sliver of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Olympic National Forest. Rising sea levels and a river’s changing course through the reservation has exacerbated not only fears of flooding, but also of what could happen if an earthquake occurred powerful enough to wreak the damage that was seen in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. Just a couple of years ago a tribal school attended by 80 children was just a foot above sea level. A powerful storm surge threw car-sized wood trunks into their schoolyard. But now the Quileute are relocating an entire village.
Along Alaska’s northwestern coast, melting sea ice has reduced natural coastal protection. Increased coastal erosion is causing some shorelines to retreat at rates averaging tens of feet per year. In Shishmaref and Kivalina, Alaska, severe erosion has caused homes to collapse into the sea, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, forcing these Alaska Native Village populations to relocate in order to protect lives and property.
“Climate change is slowly tipping the balance in favor of more frequent, longer lasting, and more intense droughts,” states the 2013 Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwestern United States (SWCA). The Navajo Nation is a prime example, with a drought that pre-dates the one that has crippled parts of California. From runaway sand dunes, to dying horses, the Navajo Nation is suffering from a lack of water.
The Agua Caliente, hit last year by wildfires, got the double whammy after the charred remains of its Indian Canyons became prone to flash flooding, forcing their closure for several months.
Sea level rise is washing away the land of this small tribe in Louisiana. The Biloxi-Chitimacha moved to the Isle de Jean Charles on the Gulf Coast in the 1840s and made a way of life there. The island—along with the rest of Louisiana’s coastline—is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico at a speed almost visible to the eye, reported Truthout in April.
“There was land on both sides of the bayou,” tribal member Chris Chaisson told Truthout. “Now, it’s just open sea.”
While the tribe faces a multitude of problems, sea level rise remains at the root of the tribe’s most pressing.
8. Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation
An April 2014 study by scientists at the Utah State University has linked this year’s California drought to global warming, the Associated Press reported. That brings us to two tribal nations that issued drought state of emergencies. The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation declared a drought emergency in April, calling upon its members to cut their water use by 20 percent.
Tribal chairman Marshall McKay put out a statement that said, “The drought threatens how we eat and drink everyday, how we manage our businesses, how we protect our environment and how we plan for our families’ futures.”
The Hoopa Valley Tribe had declared a drought state of emergency two months before the Yocha Dehe, in February. The Hoopa began formulating a drought mitigation plan that would plan out water use for three to five years, with measures such as storing water from the mountains that is currently not being tapped, beefing up fire prevention initiatives and shoring up backup water systems.
Ellen M. Banner / Seattle Times Billy Frank Jr., pictured in 2007, was praised for his courage.
Billy Frank Jr., the charismatic leader in the successful battle over fish, was praised by President Obama: “Thanks to his courage and determined effort, our resources are better protected, and more tribes are able to enjoy the rights preserved for them more than a century ago.”
He was beaten and clubbed and tear-gassed and jailed, watched police slam friends in the back with brass knuckles and saw his teenage niece punched in the face by a game agent.
Billy Frank Jr.’s decades-long battle with authorities over tribal rights to catch fish — beginning with his arrest at 14 in 1945 for filling his net with steelhead and chum — propelled him to the forefront of one of the Northwest’s greatest civil-rights movements.
And when a federal judge in 1974 affirmed Indian treaty rights to half the region’s salmon, the angry young Nisqually fisherman who’d suffered so much violence at the hands of the state didn’t simply head back to the river.
Instead, Mr. Frank transformed himself into a charismatic statesman for tribal rights, traveling the country and the world and becoming one of the nation’s most influential Native Americans.
Billy Frank Jr. — smart and generous, befriended by senators, called upon by presidents and looked up to by a generation of young tribal leaders — died Monday at home. He was 83.
“He’ll stand with all the great Indian names of the past two centuries in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation,” said his longtime friend Hank Adams, who first met Mr. Frank at the height of the region’s salmon wars in the 1960s. “His is a name that will stand out in the future for all he’s given to Indians and the world.”
His son, Willie Frank, said, “He wanted all these tribes to understand that if they worked together we could do anything.”
In the latter half of his life, Mr. Frank spent decades fighting in Olympia and Washington, D.C., to protect forests and salmon streams from excessive timber harvest and development. He battled in court, in endless public meetings and in private conversations with anyone who would listen.
He used a soft voice, strong handshake, hearty hugs and stories laced with profanity to disarm all he encountered, earning the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism in 1992.
President Obama on Monday hailed Mr. Frank’s accomplishments.
“Today, thanks to his courage and determined effort, our resources are better protected, and more tribes are able to enjoy the rights preserved for them more than a century ago,” he said in a statement.
Gov. Jay Inslee called Mr. Frank not just a tribal leader but a state leader.
“We can’t overstate how long lasting his legacy will be,” Inslee said in an interview. “He pushed the state when he needed to push the state. And he reminded the state when it needed reminding. His legacy is going to be with us for generations. My grandkids are going to benefit from his work.”
Mr. Frank was still such a force in Washington tribal and political circles, and his father had lived to be over 100, that many were caught off-guard by his death.
“We are all stunned and not prepared for this,” said W. Ron Allen, Jamestown S’Klallam tribal chairman, who had worked with Mr. Frank since the early 1980s. “He was bigger than life. It’s a very sad day for all of us.”
From the beginning, all Mr. Frank really wanted to do was catch fish, as his father had since before Washington became a state.
But despite 19th-century treaties promising Northwest tribes shared access to salmon and steelhead, as stocks plummeted early in the 20th century, state game agents began harassing and arresting tribal fishermen, including Mr. Frank’s father.
“To understand Billy, you really need to understand his dad,” said friend Tom Keefe, who first met Mr. Frank when Keefe was an aide to U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson in the late 1970s.
“Billy’s dad was really the guy who told Billy, ‘You stick with this river and if the state interferes, let them throw you in jail, but when you get back out, go back to fishing.’ ”
Mr. Frank did, again and again and again, even after a stint in the U.S. Marines in the 1950s and while working as a utility lineman in the 1960s.
By 1962, harassment was turning exceptionally violent, with state game agents staging night raids with billy clubs and tribal fishermen fighting back with rocks.
In 1964, Adams, an Assiniboine-Sioux, brought actor Marlon Brando to the Northwest to bring attention to native “fish-ins,” expecting him to fish illegally in solidarity with the tribes at Frank’s Landing near the mouth of the Nisqually. He got TV newsman Charles Kuralt to interview Mr. Frank’s father, but Brando ultimately was arrested on the banks of the Puyallup River. It would be another decade before U.S. District Judge George Boldt affirmed the tribes’ right to half of the fish harvest — and the nation’s obligation to honor the old treaties. In 1993, another court decision extended that affirmation to the harvest of shellfish.
Ann Yow / The Seattle Times, 1983 Billy Frank Jr. is shown on the Nisqually River in 1983 when he was chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, a position he held for more than 30 years.
By 1974, Mr. Frank was angry and drinking heavily. His friends had been trying to convince him he could become a great leader — if he could get past the alcohol. He entered treatment the same year Boldt made his decision and stayed sober for 40 years. Friends said it helped set the course for the rest of his life.
When Keefe introduced Mr. Frank to Magnuson, the two hit it off right away. When Magnuson lost his re-election bid, Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye took Mr. Frank under his wing. The two became very close. “Even if you didn’t agree with him, it was hard to come away not liking him,” Keefe said.
Steve Robinson, who worked side-by-side with Mr. Frank for 30 years, serving as his spokesman and writer starting in the mid-1980s, said Mr. Frank would never hesitate to do battle over what he believed. But he also had the instincts and skills of a diplomat.
“We would have visitors from Russia, Asia, South America, and he’d delight them all,” Robinson said. “He’d travel to Barrow or Kamchatka and kids would line up to see him. … He knew no strangers and hugged everybody.”
Kyle Taylor Lucas, a Tulalip Indian and former director of the Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, recalled Mr. Frank’s deft diplomacy during the scores of oft-heated meetings to negotiate Washington’s new timber harvest rules during the mid-1980s.
But Lucas noted Mr. Frank’s contributions extended far beyond fishing rights.
“I think the tendency is to compartmentalize what Billy achieved in terms of fishing,” she said. “But in fact, what he did was help to cement treaty rights for all of Indian Country, that go to health and education and so many facets of what it means to be Native American.”
Added Lucas, “When I think of him, I think of a peaceful warrior. He was so humble, he was so kind and he treated everyone with respect and dignity.”
But Mr. Frank was still a fighter to the very end, said his son, who woke his father around 6 a.m. Monday to get ready for another meeting.
Mr. Frank showered and dressed, but when Willie went back to check in, his father was hunched over in bed. The cause of death was unknown.
“I asked him every day if he was feeling good, but he would never tell me if he wasn’t,” Willie said. “He wouldn’t want people to worry about him.”
Mr. Frank was predeceased by his first and second wives, Norma and Sue Crystal, and by his daughter, Maureen. He is survived by three sons, James “Sugar,” Tanu and Willie Frank.
Services are pending.
Seattle Times staff reporter Lewis Kamb contributed to this report.
Faith Spotted Eagle slept. In her sleep, she saw her grandmother, lying on a table, wrapped in a blanket with her white braids on her chest.
Her sister appeared. “What’s going on?” Spotted Eagle asked.
“I don’t know. They told us to come.”
A door opened; a room full of people, ancestors, stared silently. She felt in their stares a sadness, but also a strength. Another door opened to another room with the same scene. She knew that if she were to keep opening doors, all the rooms in the house would be filled with those watchful, silent ancestors.
Spotted Eagle closed her eyes, unsure of what do to, but knowing that it was impolite to stare back. Then her grandmother’s voice came to her.
“Look at the treaties. There’s something in the treaties.”
That’s when she woke up.
Spotted Eagle is a Dakota/Nakota elder of the Ihanktonwan tribe in South Dakota. She wears skirts that brush her ankles, and her white braids hang over her shoulders like her grandmother’s — but when she puts on sunglasses, she looks like a badass.
She didn’t know exactly what the dream meant, but she believed it was the answer to a problem she’d been thinking about for some time: How to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from going through Lakota traditional territory, sacred land.
“Who will be able to stand with us?” she thought. “We have to stand with somebody.”
She prayed. And then she remembered the 1863 treaty between the Ihanktonwan and the Pawnee that was the first recorded peace treaty between tribes. She also remembered that, throughout the last several decades, alliances of natives and non-natives in the northern Plains had formed and re-formed to defeat threats to land and water. Recently, Lakota elders had made moves to resurrect a new Cowboy Indian Alliance – this time, to take on Keystone XL.
In late January of 2013, exactly 150 years after the signing of that first treaty, Spotted Eagle and other activists convened tribal representatives from across the continent on the Ihanktonwan reservation. Their purpose was to ratify the International Treaty to Protect the Sacred from Tar Sands and Keystone XL, a document based on that first 1863 peace treaty. It represented unprecedented unified action from North American indigenous people, with one new addition: This new treaty also included a few of the ranchers from the Great Plains, who feel their lands are also threatened by the tar sands pipeline.
Spotted Eagle told the visitors of how landowners and tribal members had come together in the past, and how they had successfully driven industry off their land. This was a version of the cowboy-Indian story these cowboys hadn’t heard.
Meanwhile, Jane Kleeb — an organizer of landowners with Bold Nebraska — was also looking for support for her small but somewhat isolated band of dissidents back home. Phone calls flew back and forth between South Dakota and Nebraska. Kleeb brought ranchers north to meet with Spotted Eagle and other indigenous leaders; the visitors were nervous and polite, unfamiliar with tribal customs – yet it became clear that they were connected by this pipeline, as well as everything they stood to lose if it went through. An alliance looked promising.
Since then, the alliance has developed, tentatively, through shared purpose. Last week, from April 22-27, members of the budding Cowboy Indian Alliance joined with activists and representatives from tribes across North America in a five-day convergence on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., called Reject and Protect. Wearing moccasins and dusty boots, they ate and prayed together, protested, danced, met with elected officials, and led a 5,000-person march through the streets, beginning each day with ceremony. Their message hung clearly on a banner by the circle of tipis: “No Damn KXL.”
A radical departure
While native/non-native alliances have been forming in various places to prevent all kinds of industrial projects, it is Keystone that has galvanized the environmental movement in a way not seen since the anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1980s. The fight has sparked hundreds of marches, rallies and legal challenges, as well as one of the largest mass civil disobedience actions in the history of the environmental movement.Time magazine wrote in 2013 that it was turning out to be a watershed, the Selma and the Stonewall of the climate movement. That remains to be seen. What’s certain is that the campaign against Keystone has already altered the political landscape.
The environmental movement has long come under criticism for being led by the so-called Big Greens — largely white, middle class membership groups whose interests don’t often represent those actually living in the frontline communities where the pipeline will be built. But the coalition of cowboys and Indians offers a radical departure from this history. Moreover, it is a model of relationship-based organizing, rooted in a kind of spirituality often absent from the progressive world, and — given the role of indigenous leaders — begins to address the violence of colonization in a meaningful way. It may be that these so-called unlikely alliances offer the only chance of forging a movement strong and diverse enough to challenge a continent’s deeply entrenched dependence on fossil fuels.
When TransCanada, the pipeline company, began claiming the right to run the Keystone XL through private property, ranchers and landowners said they finally understood, in some small way, what it might have felt like for Native Americans to lose their land. In speaking of the ranchers, Casey Camp-Horinek, an activist and elder of the Ponca tribe, said, “They, too, are suffering under things like eminent domain. They, too, have had their lifestyles impinged upon by these major corporations.”
The nightmare that’s fostering kinship
The day after Nebraska rancher Bob Allpress rode through the nation’s capitol on horseback in a cavalry contingent of ranchers and tribal members, he was a little stiff. He doesn’t ride much anymore. But Allpress, with his bandana, boots and well-groomed mustache, still looks every inch the cowboy.
When the pipeline route through Nebraska was changed in 2012, ostensibly to avoid the ecologically sensitive Sandhills, the newly proposed path now cut straight through the Allpress’ alfalfa field. If built, the pipeline would lie just 200 yards from their house.
This is no ordinary pipeline, just as tar sands is no ordinary oil. According to aNatural Resources Defense Council report, tar sands oil is 3.6 times more likely to spill than regular oil. It is also highly corrosive and nearly impossible to clean up. Residents who live near the path of Keystone 1 — a smaller, already existing tar sands pipeline operated by TransCanada — know this story already. They saw 14 spills — along its route from Canada to refineries in Oklahoma and Illinois — during the pipeline’s first year of operation.
The southern portion of the Keystone XL has already been built through Texas, in spite of grassroots resistance; now, the last northern section remains. Allpress fears that a tar sands spill would contaminate his land and water, rendering it unusable for years to come.
TransCanada used what Allpress calls “the old slap and tickle” when it notified him that the pipeline would go through his land: a nice offer of some compensation up front, but a warning that under the law of eminent domain, the pipeline would go through no matter what.
“TransCanada’s been nothing but deceitful and a bully the entire time,” he said. And in the words of his wife, Nancy, “We felt like we were the sacrifice.”
But cowboys don’t like to be pushed around. So they told TransCanada to shove it, and joined Bold Nebraska, a four-year-old organization led by Jane Kleeb that has emerged as one of TransCanada’s most formidable obstacles. When Bold Nebraska began partnering with tribes in South Dakota, the Allpresses were on board. They’ve since attended their first tribal council meetings, gone to rallies and public hearings, and written op-eds to Nebraska papers, refuting what Allpress calls TransCanada’s massive public relations campaign.
Environmental activism isn’t exactly what the Allpresses had in mind when they returned to Nebraska to retire from careers in government and the military, and investing what they had in their land.
“I’m a redneck Republican,” Allpress joked. He and his wife are both ex-military. “Standing there in cowboy boots and a hat next to people in peace necklaces and hemp shirts” is a little outside his comfort zone. “It’s been — an experience. A good experience. We’ve enjoyed the hell out of it.”
As the sun set on the first evening of the Washington, D.C. gathering, folks sat under a white tent, eating dinner on paper plates and taking refuge from the tourists who swarm the camp, saying, “Look! Real Indians!”
In one corner, the Allpresses were getting advice from fellow rancher Julia Trigg Crawford from Texas. She’s been fighting Transcanada for years — despite having to concede temporary defeat when the pipeline was installed and began pumping oil through her family’s property. Crawford filed suit and is now waiting for the Supreme Court of Texas to take up her case.
“I’m going down swinging,” she said.
The pipeline fight may be these people’s worst nightmare, but it has fostered a sense of kinship. All along its path, communities are uniting under a shared narrative of fossil fuel exploitation and resistance. Similar patterns are coalescing along the paths of the other tar sands pipelines around the continent, from Vancouver, British Columbia to Portland, Maine.
Like the Cowboy Indian Alliance, partnerships between natives and non-natives have emerged to fight tar sands — and it’s part of a larger trend right now across regions and environmental issues. Zoltán Grossman, a professor of Geography and Native Studies at Evergreen State College, has written extensively about such alliances, pointing to examples of tribes and fishermen who prevented dams and logging in the Northwest, as well as Western Shoshone and ranchers who fought bomb testing in Nevada. In recent years members of the Unist’ot’en clan in British Columbia have invited busloads of non-natives from all over Canada to help prevent a slew of tar sands and gas pipelines from crossing their land. The Cowboy Indian Alliance isn’t alone.
Fossil fuel fights are also bringing together tribes within the indigenous community, some of whom have never had a formal relationship. The tar sands cover parts of Alberta which various First Nations call home, and Crystal Lameman’s Beaver Lake Cree First Nation is among them. Lameman spent much of the week in Washington flanked by Faith Spotted Eagle and Casey Camp-Horinek, two of the leaders who are mobilizing their tribes along the length of the pipeline.
Camp-Horinek is a member of the Ponca tribe, which was forcibly relocated from Nebraska to Oklahoma in 1877. The pipeline, which originates near Lameman’s reserve, will carry tar sands along the very same path as the Ponca Trail of Tears. Camp-Horinek sees this as a direct affront to her people’s memory. And each of the women consider the tar sands a threat to their sacred land.
Camp-Horinek wears her graying braids down over her shoulders, a black shawl, and earrings, round like suns. Lameman is perhaps 30 years younger, with lipstick, outrageously long eyelashes and hair down to her waist. Despite the age difference, they’re both emblematic of the indigenous women leaders who are serving as mentors, organizers and spiritual leaders to their communities. They speak deliberately, as if their words matter. They do not say “um” or “like.” They sit up straight and laugh often.
Both women’s tribes — along with the Cowboy Indian Alliance — are some of the signatories to the International Treaty to Protect the Sacred from Tar Sands and Keystone XL. In a show of defiance and unity, several tribal councils in the United States have also passed individual resolutions condemning the Keystone XL. And Idle No More, a grassroots indigenous rights movement that sprang up suddenly in Canada during the winter of 2012, now has 700 chapters in eight countries. Thanks in part to the rise of digital networks, indigenous peoples today are reaching out to each other in ways that were unthinkable even 15 years ago.
Creating a spiritually integrated environmental movement
Each morning, the Reject and Protect encampment opened with a ceremony around the sacred fire, which was kept burning throughout the week. As smoke drifted up into the morning sun, the circle of participants — indigenous, white, young and old — would stay quiet as an elder offered a prayer.
What most don’t realize is that this would have been impossible until fairly recently. Native ceremonies were illegal for most of the 20th century as part of the U.S. government’s effort to hasten assimilation by suppressing native culture. American Indian spiritual practices were only protected by federal legislation in 1978.
The tribal elders have brought ritual to the Cowboy Indian Alliance, rooting every gathering in native ceremony. Faith often makes progressives uncomfortable; the environmental movement, to be sure, has remained stubbornly secular in the interest of inclusivity and scientific rationality. But here, people don’t seem to mind. They’re solemn; it gives each day a rhythm, a ritual, a reminder that they’re all connected to ancestors, earth and each other.
Since many of history’s most powerful social movements — from civil rights to anti-apartheid — have gained strength from a firm grounding in faith, it begs the question of whether something has been lost by remaining steadfastly irreligious. And in a country where 80 percent of the population claims some spiritual affiliation, there’s a preexisting organizational network that’s largely untapped by the environmental movement. It’s possible that the Cowboy Indian Alliance offers a glimpse into what a spiritually integrated environmental movement might look like, honoring diversity while resisting cooptation.
Part of embracing ceremony is slowing down to a more human pace of organizing — one where priority is given to relationships. Naturally, the alliance organizes on conference calls and on smart phones, but they make time for in-person gatherings, some of which last for several days, where time is given to sitting around and just talking. Telling stories, introducing their grandkids, spending time out on the land. They know that an alliance like this, tenuous and young, lives or dies by the strength of its relationships.
Jane Kleeb, Bold Nebraska’s fearless leader, says that these relationships are a part of the strategy. The early alliance meetings were about “sharing stories and building trust, so that whatever TransCanada tries to do, we were a stronger alliance that they couldn’t break.” Since the alliance lacks TransCanada’s bottomless bank account, she laughed, “The only thing I can do is build those relationships.”
By supporting native rights, the Cowboy Indian Alliance is beginning the dialogue not just about broken treaties, but about the long history of colonization, the effects of which are ongoing among some of the United States’ poorest populations. Clayton Thomas-Muller, an indigenous organizer from Canada, said that the alliance “represents an important step towards reconciling America’s bloody colonial history.”
This is perhaps why the scene on that first sunny morning of Reject and Protect was so symbolic. In accordance with custom, the alliance leaders gathered before the Chief of the Piscataway Tribe, Billy Red Wing Tayac, and formally requested permission to enter Washington, D.C. — what was originally considered Piscataway territory.
And so it was that Bob Allpress, a fourth-generation rancher, born and raised on what was once Lakota land, found himself presenting an offering to Chief Tayac, encircled by a throng of photographers. The weight of history bore down on them all — the forced removals, the outlawing of native traditions and ceremony, the theft of land guaranteed by treaties the U.S. government never really intended to keep. With the Capitol dome looming pale behind him, Chief Tayac accepted the handmade blue-jean blanket and said, “We welcome you, and we welcome all cowboys in the fight against the pipeline.”
Standing on the shoulders of earlier alliances
“Unprecedented” is a word that’s heard often in the Cowboy Indian Alliance. What most don’t realize, however, is that there is a long history of successful alliances between natives and non-natives, particularly around industrial projects that residents see as a threat to land and water.
This is actually a later incarnation of an alliance that was first formed in 1987 to prevent a Honeywell weapons testing range in the Black Hills, one of the most sacred sites in Lakota cosmology – where, in the 1970s, alliances successfully fended off coal and uranium mining. In 1980, a rancher, Marvin Kamerer, hosted 11,000 visitors at a Black Hills Survival Gathering to learn about native rights, sustainable living and clean energy. According to Native Studies scholar Zoltán Grossman, similar alliances prevented a toxic waste dump on Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in 1990, a hog farm and coal trains in the early 2000s, and Kevin Costner’s resort complex in 2002 — to name a few.
Although the alliances have generally dissolved after each campaign, each one set a precedent for future collaboration. And while they haven’t been easy, they’ve been remarkably effective.
Alliances like this go unreported, Grossman believes, because “they’re more dangerous to the status quo” than stories of conflict — that is, because they might inspire people to work together.
“The Keystone pipeline effort is standing on the shoulders of earlier successful efforts at alliance-building,” he said. “So I’m not surprised that it’s been as powerful as it has been.”
In August of 2011, 1,253 people were arrested at the White House protesting Keystone. Indigenous activists came from all over North America, going to jail side by side with non-native activists. Thomas-Muller, who also organizes with Idle No More, said that 350.org — one of the major facilitators of the action — made the move to reach out to the indigenous community and that “resulted in the biggest civil disobedience since the Vietnam War.”
The choice to focus on the pipeline came after a spectacular failure of a political strategy in which BigGreenthrew all of its weight behind the climate bill — officially known as the American Clean Energy and Securities Act. After the bill failed in the Senate, there was widespread disenchantment with the political process, a sense that the one chance for federal legislation had been lost, that the influence of the fossil fuel industry in Congress was too great. What resulted was a shift in focus away from Washington and toward local fights over coal, oil and natural gas — and a recognition that a movement isn’t really a movement unless it’s led by its grassroots base.
Enter Keystone. This was everything the climate bill was not: concrete, and easy to understand and get behind.
“You’re either for it or against it,” said Jason Kowalski, Political Director of 350.org, which helped support Reject and Protect. “The oil either flows, or it doesn’t.”
And by physically connecting impacted communities in America’s red state heartland from Alberta to Texas, it also offered a way to connect them through shared opposition — and, ultimately, shared values.
Since then, some mainstream environmental organizations have begun to step back and allow environmental justice organizations to come to the fore, something that Kowalski says hasn’t always happened.
“The indigenous people who are here have been doing this longer, and in a more heartfelt way, than any of us can imagine, on the frontlines of this fight,” Kowalski said.
Ultimately, though, there’s only one person who will make a decision on Keystone: President Obama. And so on Wednesday, April 23, nine leaders from both the cowboy and tribal contingents met with three staffers from the Obama administration to ask the president to reject the pipeline.
There was a buzz in the air at the encampment when they returned— Camp-Horinek, Faith Spotted Eagle and their compatriots were still charged from the encounter.
Each had taken a turn in the meeting telling their stories to the three staffers, in an effort to demonstrate that, in Camp-Horinek’s words, “We’re part of a devastating pipeline story that is as clear and as connected as they want Keystone XL to be.”
But the representatives of the administration, she said, remained “100 percent stone-faced.”
These were the presidents of the Rosebud and Oglala Sioux nations — sovereign nations whose treaties entitle them to meet with similarly ranked heads of state, she noted, before asking, “Where was the President of this nation to meet with us?”
So they walked out.
Tribal relationships with the United States government have, for obvious reasons, been fraught with bad feelings. Centuries of land theft, racism, genocide and forced assimilation cannot be erased overnight.
The cowboy contingent stayed, wanting to take advantage of this chance to tell their stories – hoping that some part would make its way up the ladder. But they left feeling equally discouraged. The distance between Washington and Nebraska seemed great indeed.
The White House couldn’t be reached for comment. But, according to the meeting attendees, there was something good that came out of it: assurance that the Obama administration had taken note of the coalitions, the “very different people that are coming together” around the pipeline, said Camp-Horinek. “They’re paying attention.”
The elephant in the room — or, in this case, the tipi — is the problem of land ownership. What happens when a rancher speaks of “my land” or “my private property” to a room full of people who believe that the land was stolen, and never really belonged to them in the first place? How to begin to address the competing claims to land that is central to the identity and culture of both groups?
The Cowboy Indian Alliance doesn’t seem ready to address this in public just yet. There are speeches, expressions of gratitude, fortitude, even love. The wounds of history are alluded to, but obliquely. For now, at least, these questions are secondary to the urgency of fighting the pipeline. “The land doesn’t belong to us — we’re just caretakers” is a sentiment that’s frequently heard.
Behind closed doors, however, at the first meeting of the alliance, the tribal elders laid it all out.
“We pulled no punches with them,” Camp-Horinek said. “About how the land that they live on now became land that they could buy and sell. It was our blood.”
She also insisted that “It’s part of their history as well as ours. And it has to be brought out and spoken of, or else there isn’t an alliance.”
As much as the alliance represents a step towards healing old wounds, it remains just that — a step. As a movement, said Thomas-Muller, “we need to develop an organizing framework that effectively addresses racism, oppression, misogyny and colonialism.” That work is beginning, he believes, but there’s a long way to go.
While any real dialogue about colonialism has been set aside for the moment, it has by no means disappeared. Grossman, in his study of history’s successful alliances, writes that this may not be a bad thing; that the “conventional wisdom” which tells coalitions to emphasize sameness, to downplay the native rights issue in favor of unity, is ultimately self-defeating.
“I’ve concluded that the conventional wisdom is largely bullshit,” he writes. “Emphasizing unity over diversity can actually be harmful to building deep, lasting alliances between native and non-native communities. History shows the opposite to be true: the stronger that native peoples assert their nationhood, the stronger their alliances with non-Indian neighbors.”
Grossman has a warning. “There’s always going to be an effort either to prevent alliances from coming together,” he said, by exploiting racial or class conflicts between groups. Often, that means corporations will make concessions benefiting only the privileged group in the hope that they’ll take what they can and leave. According to Grossman, alliances need to plan in advance for the inevitable divide and conquer tactics that are “as old as colonialism.”
“And the response should be: we’re not going to go home until everyone has their demands met,” he said.
Maybe their next meeting at the White House will be with Obama himself. And maybe then, if they decide to walk out, they’ll walk out together.
It’s more than property rights
In 1882, Bob Allpress’ great-grandfather built his homestead on a patch of land south of the Keya Paha River on what was then Lakota land. The land rolls under a wide sky, the hills curving like muscles of the earth.
In 1886, the Lakota signed a treaty with the U.S. government, and were relocated to reservations on the other side of the river. According to family lore, though, Allpress’ family maintained good relations with their Lakota neighbors. His great-uncle and grandfather both spoke fluent Lakota.
One hundred and thirty years later, the Allpresses invited members of the budding Cowboy Indian Alliance, including Faith Spotted Eagle, to their farm. Allpress thought there might be sacred sites somewhere on it; he’d found beads and arrowheads. Spotted Eagle, gazing over the rolling landscape, pointed to the highest ridge and told the others what she knew: that this was a burial site, sacred ground.
The pipeline, Allpress said, would “cut right down the middle of that ridge.”
He looked down at his hands for a moment before continuing. “I keep trying to tell them, but they don’t seem to care. That’s what pissed me off. They don’t care.”
This, of course, is what brings these cowboys and these Indians together: land. For some landowners it’s merely a problem of property rights. For most, though, it goes far deeper, down below the grass and soil to the very roots of their identities as either cowboys or Indians, to a sense that they are irrevocably tied to this land, that if you poison it, that they will be poisoned too.
This is why a concurrent event — to Reject and Protect in Washington — took place in Red Shirt, S.D.: a three-day nonviolent direct action training, preparing participants to physically block TransCanada’s bulldozers. It was part of a series of trainings in Lakota territory called Moccasins on the Ground that have been happening for over a year in anticipation of Obama’s pipeline decision.
“We cannot sit and wait for his decision,” the website says. “We must act now and be ready to protect our sacred water, our lands, our families.” Keystone XL — and industrial projects like it — have truly engendered a unity among indigenous peoples across North America that is unprecedented in any era.
Meanwhile, when the tipis were rolled back up and the week-long event came to a close, landowners like Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska, weren’t thinking about a vacation. They’ve got plans too.
On June 20, TransCanada’s pipeline permit will expire in South Dakota – which means that, along with Nebraska, it will be the second state where regulatory holdups are delaying the pipeline. She’s got a long list of rallies, political campaigns and court cases to organize around. For the moment, Obama’s decision has been delayed until after the November elections. For Kleeb, this is more time to grow the movement. But mostly, she wants to build.
“It takes out a lot of you to be fighting all the time — to be in the ‘warrior stance,’” she said from her car, on her way to a meeting with reporters. According to Kleeb, the focus, post-Keystone — no matter the decision — will be on constructing small clean energy projects, like the Build Our Energy Barn, constructed by volunteers in the path of the pipeline and powered by wind and solar. “Farmers and ranchers and tribes are very self-reliant,” she said, and will want to generate their own energy that doesn’t rely on imported fossil fuels.
Prophesying victory
There is an old Lakota prophecy of a black snake, a creature that would rise from the deep, bringing with it great sorrow and great destruction. For many years, the Lakota people have wondered what the prophecy meant and when it would come to pass.
When they heard news of this pipeline – this tube, immeasurably long, that would pump black oil through the heart of this country — some Lakota people began to wonder if the snake appeared at last.
These cowboys and Indians believe they will win. But what then? Will this alliance fall apart, as others have in the past? If they defeat this black snake, what happens to the other black snakes, in other back yards, to the network of pipelines that are spreading across the land like veins? Will the relationships last?
“No doubt,” said Kleeb. She’s received messages from landowners saying that the week in Washington “touched them to their very core. One of the landowners said that it gave them a deep, emotional respect for their fellow landowners and ranchers but also for the tribes, which they didn’t have before.”
Casey Camp-Horinek said that she’s not privy to the future. “But the people that we are aligning ourselves with,” she said, “I really believe they’re going to help us uphold those treaty rights.”
There is another prophecy that is also spoken of by tribal elders from different nations: the prophecy of the Seventh Generation, which, loosely put, foretells a time when young people would lead an uprising, joining with other peoples to defend land and allow humans to continue living on the earth.
Far from her homeland, in the middle of the National Mall, flanked by monuments to a colonizing nation, Camp-Horinek spoke of the work before her, and for her sons and their children, who are also here. Joining with cowboys, she said, “fulfills not only the prophecy, but it fulfills a sacred duty that we were born with.”
