Urgent Call for Volunteer Sheepherders at Black Mesa

New impoundment threats issued

from Black Mesa Indigenous Support

Over this past week, law enforcement and Hopi land management officers entered Sovereign Dineh Nation territories at Big Mountain/Black Mesa, Arizona with orders to count Dineh livestock. They issues 5-day notices to Dineh families, threatening to impound so-called “trespassing” sheep, goats, and cattle.

“In times like these it’s hard for me to eat or sleep,” stated elder matriarch Glenna Begay. “I lay up at night worried for my animals. The sheep are my children. The horses too are relatives. They have been with us since the beginning.”

Families and elders resisting forced relocation policies on their ancestral homelands are urgently requesting volunteers to assist with maintaing the daily struggle. This primarily involves herding sheep throughout the day and doing basic chores. In this time of escalated police activity, supporters are also asked to be observant and record police or government actions.

Livestock-related harassment by law enforcement is an annual occurrence that families resisting federal relocation policies endure, however, harassment and livestock impoundments have intensified in recent years. Armed officers conducted raids against families in 2014 and 2016.  These actions serve as painful reminders of the long history of US genocidal campaigns against the Dineh people.
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Pipelines and Battle Lines

by Will Parrish / The Bohemian

On a rainy weekday afternoon last November, about 20 people from Northern California joined a 200-person rally outside the Oregon capitol in Salem. They had assembled partly in support of the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. In the weeks prior, police on the northern Great Plains had inflicted beatings on anti-DAPL protesters, shot hundreds with concussion grenades and rubber bullets, and even deployed military-surplus equipment such as armored vehicles and a long-range acoustic device, a noisy crowd-control device that reportedly shattered at least one person’s eardrums.

The main focus of the Salem demonstration, however, was an infrastructure project similar to the DAPL but much closer to home. Spurred by the newfound ability to extract vast shale deposits from the Rocky Mountains’ western slopes via hydrologic fracturing (fracking), a Canadian oil and gas company named Veresen has proposed to ship natural gas from the Rockies west to Asian markets via a newly constructed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Coos Bay, Ore., where gas would be chilled and liquefied for easier and cheaper storage and transport. Known as the Jordan Cove Energy Project, it would be the first Pacific Coast LNG terminal.

The terminal would be supplied by the 233-mile Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline, which would originate at a natural gas transport hub near Malin, Ore., and snake beneath five major rivers on its way to Coos Bay. One river beneath which the pipeline would be plumbed is the mighty Klamath, which rises in southern Oregon and meets the ocean roughly 240 miles away at the Humboldt-Del Norte county lines.

At the rally, indigenous people from the Klamath Basin talked about building a stronger interstate alliance against the project.

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Walter Bond is in the SHU (Solitary Confinement)

from Support Walter

Walter was placed in the SHU on Monday because he is being investigated for an assault. He can’t discuss the incident because he is being investigated. He said he could be there for a few months. He would like to receive letters from you all, and include your address in the body of the letter even if you are already a correspondent, because he doesn’t have anybody’s address where he is now. He sounded okay. We can make his time in the hole go faster by sending him entertaining letters and cards. Jokes and funny stories and pictures are good.

Walter Bond
37096-013
FCI Greenville
PO Box 5000
Greenville IL 62246

Maybe you only know a little about Walter, and it’s hard to imagine what he is like as a person. Some of what makes him stand out as both a personable individual and as a man with clear insight who is willing and able to extend himself for right, comes out in his recent interview conducted by NAALPO’s Dr. Jerry Vlasak.

Chile: Anarchists Erect Barricades in Solidarity With the Two Murdered Mapuche Activists

from Insurrection News

June 14th, Santiago, Chile. About a dozen encapuchadxs (hooded ones) blocked traffic, distributed leaflets and raised banners outside the Metropolitan Technological University in solidarity with the Mapuche who were murdered in the south during a land reclamation action. “The weichafes (warriors) Luis Marileo and Patricio Gonzales will be avenged with blood.”

A leaflet left at the scene reads: “No action without a response, resistance is not terrorism. Weichafes and subversives on a war footing against capitalism. POPULAR JUSTICE NOW!”

Ranchers, Drug Traffickers Threaten Guatemala Forest Reserve

from Telesur

Update on No DAPL Water Protectors Facing Charges

by The Freshet Collective

The long, arduous battle has continued in Mandan and Bismarck courts for more than 600 water protectors facing charges for resisting the Dakota Access pipeline. The Freshet Collective has grown from a bail fund to a collective of legal organizers, committed to serving the needs of those who put their lives and liberty on the line to stand up for Indigenous sovereignty and protect the sacred. We support water protectors with open cases through outreach, legal education, attorney coordination, travel arrangements, hospitality, and court solidarity.

Morton County is slowly prosecuting hundreds of DAPL cases that have generally been scheduled chronologically according to arrest date. Arrestees with charges from the mass arrest on October 22, 2016 are only now seeing their cases go before the court and we expect trials from the mass arrest on October 27 to begin in mid-July.  Those arrested in early 2017 will not have trials until 2018.

Water protectors face a profoundly biased and at times explicitly racist criminal legal system. (more…)

An Update on the 2017 Round River Rendezvous in Northern California

1. from the Earth First! Newswire

Hey folks,

The Rondy is fast approaching and we want to make sure everyone has the info they need to get there! Here are the latest updates:

As mentioned in our previous post, the Rendezvous will run from July 2-9. It is going to be near the Humboldt/Trinity county line in northern California, along a river in a beautiful conifer forest. There should be plenty of parking, and it’s about a half mile hike to the main camping site. If you are flying in or otherwise coming from far off, the airport closest to the site is the Arcata-Eureka airport, and Eureka is the nearest big town.

Other important info:
-There will be a kitchen providing breakfast, dinner, and some snacky goodness. Utensils and dishware will be provided. There will also be purified water from a nearby creek.
-It’s going to be a dry rondy.
-Bring camping gear, hot and rainy weather gear (we don’t know how the weather will be), and any other food(s) you want personally for lunch and snacks.

Directions coming soon!

Pipeline to the Classroom: How Big Oil Promotes Fossil Fuels to America’s Children

by Jie Jenny Zou / The Guardian

This story was a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and StateImpact Oklahoma, a reporting project of NPR member stations in Oklahoma.

Jennifer Merritt’s first graders at Jefferson elementary school in Pryor, Oklahoma, were in for a treat. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the students gathered for story time with two special guests, Republican lawmakers Tom Gann and Marty Quinn.

Dressed in suits, the two men read aloud from “Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream,” a parable in which a Bob the Builder-lookalike awakens to find his toothbrush, hard hat and even the tires on his bike missing.

Abandoned by the school bus, Pete walks to Petroville elementary in his pajamas.

“It sounds like you’re missing all of your petroleum by-products today!” Pete’s teacher, Mrs Rigwell, exclaims, extolling oil’s benefits to Pete and fellow students like Sammy Shale. Before long, Pete decides that “having no petroleum is like a nightmare!”

The tale is the latest in an illustrated series by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, a state agency funded by oil and gas producers. The board has spent upwards of $40m over the past two decades on providing education with a pro-industry bent, including hundreds of pages of curriculums, a speaker series and an after-school program – all at no cost to educators of children from kindergarten to high school.

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Statement from Krow

from June 11th

When I think of solidarity in the context of the June 11th holiday, in conjunction with writing the obvious letter to our caged comrades, I believe in the prioritization of engaging in living resistance utilizing/creating structures therein that allow rad folk to circumnavigate being caged. The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement’s most recent communiqué offers some suggestions that may enrich hypothetical efforts (it’s free online and worth your time).

More immediately, we can also activate general prisoner solidarity by once more utilizing/creating local legal/bail funds to free any and all who are incarcerated and eligible for bail on this day. Even in the move from specific (eco-prisoners) to general terms, prisoners, if we are to be ‘solid’ with one, we must be solid with the other, as they are oppressed by one of the same forces and entities- the state. As always, no prisons means no prisoners. This is not to dilute the focus of this very important day from eco-prisoners, just extend the scope and reach of our support.

Outreach to un-politicized prisoners is a common good that needs doing and also holds potential to radicalize more people, thus also potentially adding them to the cause and discussions of the proverbial “team”. We must be prefigurative in all that we do, valuing the process of achieving and actively living (daily) revolutionary lifestyles just as much as the diverse outcomes of those processes (derived from recent inspirations of Marianne Maeckelbergh’s “The Will of the Many”)

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Mexico: Oaxacan Indigenous Communities Resist Megaprojects

by Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F / Avispa Midia / It’s Going Down

The Chinantec people, inhabitants of the Cajonos River basin in the north of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, are carrying out an organizational process throughout their entire territory, the Chinantla, against economic projects that seek to commodify nature as a whole. They are megaprojects such as mining, hydroelectric dams, highways, conservation projects, and, more recently, hydrocarbons. It is not a coincidence Chinantla is considered a priority of economic interest for the Mexican government. It houses the third largest tropical rainforest in Mexico. After the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas, and the Chimalapas in Oaxaca, it is the best preserved and one of the richest in biodiversity.

“The Chinantla is a priority area for exploitation because of its wealth, its diversity. It’s part of a strategic Mesoamerican plan that comprises all that is Veracruz, the Chinantla zone, Chiapas and Central America in the so-called Plan Mérida and Mesoamerica Project. The objective of the Mexican government and businesses is to create a corridor for the exploitation of water, minerals, coal reserves, and electricity-generating projects. Here are the plants, bacteria, mushrooms that heal and these are all things they also want to take away,” explained biologist Patricia Mora, from the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Integral Regional Development – Oaxaca Unit of the National Polytechnic Institute (CIIDIR Oaxaca). (more…)