Re: <nettime> TREATY PEOPLE

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

hey brian, thanks for sending this moving report.

it strikes me that these Treaty People actually have treaties to refer 
to which, if they were honoured, would create bearable situations -- in 
comparison with so many other situations where there are only bad deals 
or "contracts" that were rotten in the first place, or straightforward 
robbery.
i found this reference to "what it means to be treaty people":

https://thevarsity.ca/2017/05/20/what-it-means-to-be-treaty-people/

regards,

-a


Am 12.06.21 um 20:03 schrieb Brian Holmes:
> The Mississippi River springs from innumerable lakes and wetlands in 
> northern Minnesota, where the indigenous Ojibwe harvest wild rice. In an 
> insane and suicidal world, what could be more beautiful than a rolling 
> green protest camp full of activists chanting "Water is life"?
> We got up early last Monday and made our way to the previously secret 
> location. It was a construction site: a pumping station along the route 
> of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which, if ever completed, would send 
> almost a million barrels of Tar Sands crude every day to US refineries 
> and Gulf Coast exporters. We were there to blockade, lock down on the 
> equipment and ultimately get arrested by the police: civil disobedience 
> by around two hundred people, with hundreds more in active support. 
> Meanwhile another, even larger group was heading for peaceful and 
> prayerful protest near Coffeepot Landing, at an Enbridge construction 
> easement where the pipeline would cross beneath the nascent Mississippi, 
> only a few yards wide at that point. Those folks are still there, 
> camping on the easement, after the indigenous sheriff decided on 
> conscience that he could not repress their action.
> I can tell you that it was blazing hot in the sun, that it was fabulous 
> to lock arms with your neighbors and find out why they had come to stare 
> down the cops, and that in a world condemned by speed and greed, there 
> is no better use of your precious time than a pipeline protest to 
> protect the rights of the people whom colonial capitalism has always 
> tried to eliminate, in order to create the disaster that is now facing 
> all of us.
> Jane Fonda spoke quite wonderfully while I sat in the shade of a 
> bulldozer, but incomparably more inspiring were the voices of Winona 
> LaDuke, from Honor the Earth, and Tara Houska, an indigenous lawyer and 
> founder of the Giniw protest camp.
> When the fuzz finally came out in force, late in the afternoon, they 
> were fast to invade and seal the pump station perimeter, but slow to 
> extract the activists who had locked down on the machines. Those of us 
> who were outside the gate at that moment formed a line and advanced 
> right up to the noses of the cops, chanting for hours till the sun set 
> with glorious colors and they finally came for all of us. The local 
> jails were full by then, so we would only get citations. They zip tied 
> our hands behind our backs and dragged us over to some bare bulldozed 
> ground. As I went down in the dust, a cry rose up: "Who are we?" 
> Everyone roared back with one voice: "Treaty People!"
> A protest action takes bodies and plans, concepts and visions. This 
> action was exquisitely planned to reveal the water and wild rice at one 
> site, the destructive equipment at another. The vision was clear: a 
> restoral of indigenous life in the territory, coinciding with a drawdown 
> of fossil-fuel infrastructure. And the concept was far-reaching.
> If we didn't know it already, we learned at the camp that the treaties 
> made between native tribes and the early US state were "the supreme law 
> of the land," enshrined in the Constitution, but honored only in the 
> breach. Those treaties gave the tribes who signed them rights to hunt, 
> fish, gather and carry out ceremonial activities on the treaty territory 
> forever, even though indigenous ownership of the land would be 
> restricted to much smaller reservations. Today those treaty rights must 
> be extended to entire ecosystems, because resource extraction, overuse 
> of water and relentless industrial pollution threaten every aspect of 
> native lifeways.
> It takes two to make a treaty, and it takes two to uphold it. At the 
> camp, indigenous leaders encouraged us to think, not only about them, 
> their sufferings and their dreams, but about ourselves, who we are, 
> where we came from and how we got to this place. As the descendants of 
> European settlers, and/or as citizens of the United States, we have not 
> only rights, but also unique and important treaty obligations. The 
> colonial capitalist state is a traitor to its own law. Protest, 
> political engagement and active solidarity have become ways that we, as 
> individuals and groups, can begin fulfilling our part of the bargain.
> Who am I in the era of climate change? My ancestors came from the 
> British isles and the Dalmatian coast. I was born in San Francisco, 
> surrounded by an extraordinary natural environment. Yet today I live in 
> a scorched world, whose probable destiny became so bitterly clear last 
> year, when the California fires burned down the home that my family had 
> built with our own hands. How much more terrible is this scorching 
> feeling for young people in their twenties, who came in such large 
> numbers to put their bodies on the line in Anishanaabe treaty territory 
> in northern Minnesota? We shall have to spend the rest of our lives 
> searching, not only for who we are, but for a world that we can live in. 
> Neither of these things will be easy, though they may be intuitive for 
> some. You cannot erase the past, but you can chose to inherit what still 
> promises a future. In relation to the fragile and contested 
> sovereignties of the Indigenous, we USians can strive to be Treaty People.
>
> ***
>
>
> Some links to find out more:
>
> https://www.stopline3.org <https://www.stopline3.org>
> https://welcomewaterprotectors.com <https://welcomewaterprotectors.com>
> https://twitter.com/GiniwCollective <https://twitter.com/GiniwCollective>
> https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/rising-up-to-the-heat-treaty-people-gathering-resists-line-3-pipeline 
> <https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/rising-up-to-the-heat-treaty-people-gathering-resists-line-3-pipeline>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html 
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html>
>
>
>
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