Indigenous

On December 2, 2016, in the community of Alacatlatzala, Guerrero, an indigenous and popular armed group was founded, with its principal goal being to manage their own security and that of their families, lands and territories, due to the immense and increasing violence and extortion these communities exist in, far removed from “progress” and the assistance of the Mexican government. As such, under the principles of autonomy and popular sovereignty, dozens of indigenous Na’ Savi people have taken up arms - though they clarify that it is symbolic – in order to create a collective rupture with organized crime, municipal police and the army, who have led the way in trampling the life and peace of this and other communities that form the Regional Coordinator of Justice & Security and the Citizen & Popular Police (CRSJ-PCP), also formed on a December 2, but in 2012, December 2 being the date when teacher and revolutionary Lucio Cabañas Barrientos was murdered.

By LOUISE ERDRICH
New York Times

DEC. 10, 2016

Near Cannon Ball, N.D. — Last Sunday, the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock in North Dakota was slick with icy, packed-down snow. The mud was glass. Veterans poured in, having traveled all night to support the people protecting their water from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

I linked arms with Loretta Bad Heart Bull, and we teetered up to the central prayer circle with Art Zimiga, an Oglala Hunkpapa Vietnam veteran who had just been gifted a pair of crampons. The sun was still warm, the air scented with burning cedar.

The sudden announcement that an easement to cross the Missouri River had been denied by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, dealing the pipeline an apparent setback, sent roars of joy, waves of song, disbelief, joy again, all through the camp.

Author: #IndianWinter
ROAR Magazine
November 19, 2016
 

The Standing Rock occupation is a movement based on presence. In taking space and time away from Energy Transfer Partners, from the Army Corps of Engineers, from Morton County, from North Dakota, from the United States of America, Standing Rock has come to embody the largest show of resistance in the United States since at least the Ferguson riots of 2014.

by CrimethInc

The Battle

When we arrive on Wednesday, October 26, we can’t find our contacts, the friends and friends of friends who have been vouched into the secretive Red Warrior camp. Word around the camp is that eviction is imminent for Sacred Ground, the only camp in the direct path of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe claims this land is territory granted to them in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, and that they were using their own “eminent domain” to take it back when they set up the camp. We decide to set up at Sacred Ground and to figure out how to make ourselves useful in stopping its eviction.

In response to a call for solidarity action from the Camp of the Sacred Stones and the Red Warrior Camp, Philly took to the streets. Over 400+ people marched downtown for Native sovereignty, land and water rights -- and against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The group stopped at 5 different TD Bank locations to call on TD to stop funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. In addition to the march, 5 TD Bank locations were shut down by groups in solidarity with land defenders on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. 7 were arrested and are all out of jail and doing well.

Much love to Reclaim Philadelphia, Philly SURJ, EQAT, Philly Thrive, Philly Student Union, Beyond Extreme Energy and many many others who threw down today!

By Wolverine de Cleyre
Slingshot
Fall 2015
Berkeley, Calif.

Wedged into the back of an overheated a van, I am weaving through the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, waiting to arrive in Oventik, a Zapatista town that is having their annual Festival del los Caracoles, their Snail or Spiral Festival. The Zapatistas are an indigenous resistance movement that first captured world attention January 1, 1994, when several thousand of them took control of towns and cities in Chiapas, freed prisoners from jail, and set fire to police stations and military barracks. The news was accompanied by gripping images of masked women with a baby in one arm and a gun in the other.

Source: Enlace Zapatista

WORDS OF THE EZLN ON THE 22ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR AGAINST OBLIVION

WORDS OF THE EZLN ON THE 22^ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR AGAINST OBLIVION

January 1, 2016

Steve Russell
Indian Country Today
8/24/15

We call it the European Invasion but modern academics have a more anodyne term, “Columbian Encounter.” Whatever you call it, the civilizations invaded or encountered left physical evidence on the land that far exceeds what could have been done by Native Americans in the numbers commonly thought to have lived in 1492. The most conservative studies estimated the Indian population in all of Amazonia to have been only one or two million souls when the Spanish arrived. Writers in the 18th and 19th centuries—including writers of judicial opinions—claimed that Native Americans were few and knew nothing of the sophisticated farming techniques practiced by Europeans. Those claims, dominant in American colonial literature, are being destroyed by 21st century science.

David Goodman
Yes! Magazine
Feb 12, 2015

Patricia Gualinga stands serenely as chaos swirls about her. I find this petite woman with striking black and red face paint at the head of the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, 2014. She is adorned with earrings made of brilliant bird feathers and a thick necklace of yellow and blue beads. She has come here from Sarayaku, a community deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

Behind Gualinga, 400,000 people are in the streets calling for global action to stop climate change. Beside her, celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, and Mark Ruffalo prepare to lead the historic march alongside a group of indigenous leaders. Gualinga stands beneath a sign, “Keep the Oil in the Ground.” She has traveled across continents and cultures to deliver this message.