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Title: Now and Later Author: Hot N Bothered Date: 3/18/2022 Language: en Topics: pipelines, direct action, central ohio, climate change, columbus, Cultivating Sustainable Resistance, environmental justice, midwest, ohio
This issue, we will be discussing some important campaigns against
domineering ecology and the pacification of the movement. Something we
often neglected to do in our first issue, which we will practice moving
forward, is working to provide content, warnings and preface to our
discussion.
Today we have a content warning that we will be discussing grave
digging, corporate violence and state violence.
We also wanted to start providing a land acknowledgment and the start of
our shows, which is also in a process of revision. So today we're
recording on Ohio State's campus. The land that Ohio State occupies is
the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi,
Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe & Cherokee Peoples.
Specifically, the university resides on land, ceded in the 1795 Treaty
of Greenville and the forced removal of tribes through the Indian
Removal Act of 1830. But in saying that, I want to acknowledge that
acknowledgment is just one step in recognizing and reckoning with U.S.
history, and we need to go much further than solely acknowledgment.
So our opening land acknowledgment will likely change as we continue to
learn and grow here on hot and bothered. We would like to welcome all
readers to hold us accountable to that promise and be open to
suggestions for change. We will also do the work of moving past
acknowledgments into action.
So to recap on our last issue, we really set the stage of our time
together. We discussed how important it is to base our discussion of any
environmental justice related topics and the principles of abolition.
And we talked a little bit about the âbeginning of the environmental
justice movement in the United Statesâ Now we get to tie in our
foundation with some real examples that dive a little bit deeper into
the past, present and future environmental justice movement and feature
our first interview.
We covered a lot of ground in the last print. If you remember, we
covered the 1982 Warren County protest in North Carolina, which is one
of the hallmark moments in E.J. movement U.S. history. But the Warren
County protest was not the first or only of its kind at that time.
The movement resulted as a culmination of civil protests against
environmental pollution across the United States, with demonstrations
occurring in Triana, Alabama and a region known as Cancer Alley,
Louisiana, in addition to Warren County. This accumulation of
demonstrations really gave rise to the environmental justice movement,
but also at the same time a lot of organizations started popping up to
sustain those fights.
As we talked about the academic roots of the environmental justice
movement, it's important to recognize the cultural legacies of
resistance that researchers have been studying. The fight against such
systems of organizations have been going on since we started populating
around agricultural sites, establishing the city states.
Some of the most drastic instances of these practices of domineering
ecology stem from European colonizers enforcing agricultural techniques
upon land they wish to facilitate settlements on. Over the years with
strong black and indigenous resistance all over the colonies and an ever
expanding crisis of biodiversity and climate change. Settlers were
forced to accept the realities of their occupation. This resulted in
settlers taking up actions on their own and or joining other existing
camps of resistance around their respective regions. Horacio R. Trujillo
observed
âThe first major wave of direct actions carried out by radical
environmentalists in the United States occurred in 1970, following the
first Earth Day celebration. The activists included the Arizona Phantom,
who dismantled railroad tracks and disabled equipment in an attempt to
stop construction of a coal mine in the desert highlands; the
Eco-Raiders, a group of male college students who caused $500,000 in
damage by burning billboards, disabling bulldozers, and vandalizing
development projects in and around Tucson; the Fox, who plugged drainage
pipes, capped factory smoke-stacks, and dumped industrial waste from a
U.S. Steel plant into the Chicago offices of the companyâs CEO; the
Billboard Bandits, who toppled roadside advertisements in Michigan; and
the Bolt Weevils, a group of farmers in Minnesota who disabled 14
electrical towers that were to be used for a new power line across the
prairieâ
In 1971, Greenpeace was founded to accelerate the movement of
environmental justice and forms of direct action, with some of its
splinter groups committing to more radical and transformative actions.
These groups are thought to have inspired the founders of Earth First!,
a collective founded on the principles of economic disruption as a
tactic to make unsustainable industries unprofitable. While economic
disruption was not a new tactic. Its time at the forefront of radical
action was a dramatic shift in perspective for environmental politics,
particularly in the face of settler political systems. The scene
beforehand had been restricted to polite politics that often led to the
perpetuation of extractive social, political and ecological frameworks.
The indigenous struggle against colonization and such frameworks and the
subsequent extractivism is an important foundation for where the
movement is today. Focusing on fluid, internal structures, economic
disruption and land based politics are just some of the more noticeable
characteristics of black and indigenous resistance that are still alive
in the milieu of radical environmentalism today, with neoliberal
economics on the rise and states engaging in foreign intervention,
securing extractive energy resources in global hegemony, more disruptive
tactics have transferred from indigenous and black resistance for
self-determination to the public imagination of European and American
settler and environmentalist movements, meaning that the practice of
disrupting trade and sabotaging cargo in the name of negating the forces
that prevail over our autonomy has been woven through the history of
black people in America and has been taken into the forefront throughout
the past 50 to 80 years. Revolts carried out by enslaved folks was a
tradition that was embarked on both the boats and in the daily life of
working into the colonies, securing our own sense of autonomy outside of
the Empire and plantation. The increasing BIPOC presence and the radical
settings today has led to an increased attempt to escape the logic of
the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene as the era defined by human
domination of ecological processes. One particular reason radical black
and indigenous resistance has always had a flavor of empire ending is
simply because we were left with no other viable option for survival.
With the state being one of the most complicit and active agents in the
destruction of global biodiversity, planetary toxification and climate
change, we must be able to analyze its role in the degradation of our
planetary health.
The main reason that the state and market destroy everything that they
touch is because they're based on an extractive ideology that aims to
make a profit, which is rooted in settler colonialism, as we have talked
about at length.
But this profit making does not come from nowhere. It comes at the
expense of human lives. Laura Pulido of the University of Southern
California defines this process of deriving social and economic value
from the racial identity of a person as racial capitalism.
Pulido wrote that,
âthe state refuses to implement meaningful initiatives in order to
maintain racial capitalism. Capital does not have to actually address
environmental justice issues because it knows there will be minor, if
any, sanctions. Indeed, bureaucrats seek to avoid the anger of
conservatives by not enforcing the law. The state is not about to
dismantle this âecological serviceâ that allows firms to remain
competitive in the global marketplace. When we put together these two
facts â the devaluation of people of color, plus capital acting with
legal impunity â environmental racism must be understood as
state-sanctioned racial violence.â
This reality has definitely helped bolster acts of solidarity and led to
an increase in environmental direct action. Such an understanding of the
global powers also allows for change in perspective, especially in
communities that have managed to, if not completely escape or ignore
state violence, but benefit from it.
OK, now let's talk about how the environmental movement has been failing
to achieve its goals. I mean, it's not a failure, but it's not a
success. It's like an UN success or an UNfailure, but it's something and
it's partially because of the co-optation by the state that we've been
talking about, but it's also partially because of declines in really
impactful direct actions that lead to social change. So what I mean when
I say failure is that the environmental movement has to this point
failed to stop rampant industrial pollution. The environmental movement
in the United States saw its peak in the 1970s, when movement activists
gathered by the millions to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970. This
sparked the formation of a bunch of organizations, some we spoke about,
but it also sparked the formation of the Environmental Protection
Agency.
You know, the EPA and the passing of the National Environmental Policy
Act, or NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the subsequent
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976. However, the movement
has not seen many significant changes in environmental degradation since
the passage of these policies.
Some scholars contend that the RCRA is a representation of the
co-optation of the mainstream environmental movement by industrial
actors. In fact, pollution has only increased in the U.S. since the peak
of the environmental movement in the 1970s. The U.S. now produces 5
million kilotons of carbon emissions annually as compared to 4.3 million
in 1970. So the U.S. environmental movement may be regarded as a failed
social movement to this point. As environmental degradation is rampant
and climate change has not been prioritized at the national policy
level.
But leading up to the 1970s,Silent Spring made a huge wave, and the
anti-toxics movement produced some policies and everyone was lit on
Earth Day in 1970. Everyone was so excited about the blue marble picture
and then it seemed like it just stopped.
For those who are unfamiliar, Silent Spring was Rachel Carson's
environmental science book about the pesticide DDT, which finally pushed
the U.S. government to intervene in the markets rampant production of
poisons. You could argue that they really never stopped producing that
level of poison, and I would agree with you. But silent spring was a
huge book for the movement in that time anyway. What happened?
Why do we see direct action fade away? And actually what we mean is why
do we see direct action kind of fade out of the public imagination like
it never actually left?
You know, the last landmark policy change to date on climate was
actually a result of the environmental justice movement's activism,
rather than the influence of the mainstream environmental movement. With
the passage of the executive order 12898 on environmental justice, which
was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. And that executive order
just stated that. In order to address injustice, environmental
injustice, we have to consider the ways that our social identities play
into the creation of environmental injustice. So this is the executive
order that said that race is a factor in environmental harm and we need
to eliminate disproportionate exposure to harm based on race and class.
And then recently, actually there was Justice 40, which was an executive
order signed by President Biden and his first month in office in 2020
that pledged to commit 40% of the investments in clean energy to
climate, to disadvantaged communities.
Which sounds great, right? But recently, the Biden administration
decided that they're actually not going to consider race as a
determining factor of what marginalizes communities, what actually
qualifies them as receiving these investments, which is insanity. If you
read the first issue, you know that it is very important that we do
consider race to be a factor in producing environmental harm. So what
does that mean for justice 40? I wish I could talk at length about it,
but I can't because I haven't, like, read the whole thing and the
outcomes of them saying that race is no longer a factor, but all I'm
saying is that it doesn't sound good.
But anyway, after the passing of, you know, the EPA, the Clean Air Act,
Clean Water Act, the Executive Order 1212 898, after the passing of
these policies, just like it always happens and a movement policy cycle
situation, people became a bit complacent. This complacency led to kind
of like the full co-optation of the environmental movement by
institutions of whiteness. We touched on this in episode one, but the
mainstream environmental movement is generally seen as a racially
exclusive movement in which there's a consistent focus on serving the
interests of whites. After the 1970s, environmental activists began to
focus on recycling as a means to push the environmental agenda forward
via the establishment of environmental regulations at federal and state
levels. However, this had an unintended negative consequence of hyper
focusing the movement's resources on establishing a national recycling
infrastructure.
Further, the focus on recycling shifted the burden of mitigating
environmental degradation away from corporations, which were polluting
the environment, to individuals who were consuming industrial products.
As such, the responsibility for environmental protection was no longer
rooted in the need for systemic changes to capital production processes.
Another unintended negative consequence of focusing on recycling was
that in the face of negative research findings related to pollution from
recycling. Environmental activists were kind of, I mean, you could kinda
say that. They were âforcedâ to support recycling, despite its
shortcomings as a clean industrial process. So the shift from systemic
to individual responsibility for managing environmental disaster also
limited the ability of citizens to participate in the environmental
decision-making process as the movement focused not on mobilizing
citizens to engage in disruptive collective action, but to âconsciously
consume industrial products.â
Recycling proved to be another instance in which the environmental
movement exclusively served the white community while ignoring the
impacts of this process on nonwhite communities. And there's actually a
really great book by David Pellow called Garbage Wars.It talks about
how, you know, recycling facilities⊠they're still polluting facilities
and they're still disproportionately negatively harming the health of
BIPOC communities, even though they're touted as clean infrastructure.
But as we also discussed just now, the shift away from direct action
towards less disruptive tactics is supported by the institutions of
racial capitalism and whiteness like this? This is the era of nimbyism,
which, if you are unfamiliar, means not in my backyard activism.That's
the the acronym in which more powerful social actors such as landowning
whites, middle class and upper class whites, etc. are able to push
polluting facilities into other neighborhoods. And their activism kind
of stops once they achieve that goal, once it's not in their backyard
anymore. So this is just another example of racial capitalism. And what
Kimberly Crenshaw explains as whiteness, as property, as a facet of
critical race theory like the byproducts of industrial pollution are
deemed as a problem only to the extent that they harm or do not serve
the interests of whites.And after those byproducts are relocated to harm
some other population NIMBY activists or set off satisfied. So the point
is that the institutions of whiteness that we're discussing have
contributed to the failures of the environmental movement and a mixture
of ways. We need to move past that and recenter justice oriented
approaches to environmental degradation and the climate crisis. If we
are ever going to really be able to live through the climate crisis.
Despite the complacency, despite the co-optation or the attempted
co-optation, we do see continued resistance on the ground, despite
competition by market interests, there is a mainstay of direct action at
pipelines and logging sites. I want to say, like front line communities
that are on the ground blockading pipelines. Blocking logging projects,
they've always been here.
They've never stopped defending their land and their livelihoods.
Opposition to pipelines has always been here. It just falls out of the
public eye from time to time. And so today we're going to talk about
what we can learn from the pipeline issue.
So currently, environmental justice activists have taken the pipeline
issue to the center of frontline community organizing. There's a
diversity of focal areas within this issue, including the targeting of
fracked gas plants, fracked shale mining fields, crude oil pipelines,
offshore oil drilling and tar sands pipeline operations. Because there's
so many ways that we're extracting resources from this Earth. Specific
examples include the Keystone XL Pipeline, Dakota Access Mountain Valley
and Enbridge Line three pipelines and locally, the Ohio State combined
heat and power plant, which is in Columbus, Ohio, and another one more
in Central Ohio; the Northern Loop project from Columbia Gas.
All right. So the main tactic used by activists across the U.S. to
combat the further construction of pipelines has been the use of
blockades in addition to intensive public media campaigns and protests
raising awareness of the issue. Many of these acts of resistance have
been led by indigenous leaders of the environmental justice movement,
who organize in pursuit of land sovereignty, self-determination and
Earth jurisprudence. The Indigenous Environmental Network has been
integral in organizing activists and systematic blockades and
demonstrations of vulnerable areas of pipeline construction, in addition
to a lot of groups within the network and outside of the network.
Activists will camp parked vehicles in front of construction areas, lock
themselves to pipeline equipment and occupy tree lines. In addition to
the destruction of property such as construction equipment like cranes
and forklifts, these are acts of civil disobedience in which activists
are often arrested Bail funds are organized to account for those taken
to jail and then, coupled with media campaigns and the emergence of a
youth led international climate justice protests and strike movement.
These tactics have been successful in halting construction of some
pipelines in the US. However, activists have been less successful at
permanently decommissioning pipelines or winning legal campaigns against
them.
Yet the fight against extractive industry stays alive despite the
constant state repression. The United States Governmentâs history with
the dispossession of native land leaves them well-equipped and trained
to repress instances of resistance, often on the payroll of the
corporation facing community pushback. Corporations have been doing a
lot more than just paying off the cops. Companies are known to buy off
surrounding land around a project just to make sure that they can
utilize police forces on a whim. A synthesis of their settler colonial
techniques can be observed at Standing Rock, Nick Estes, an organizer
with the Red Nation & assistant professor at the University of New
Mexico recalls,
âIn the early morning hours of Saturday, September 3, 2016, blood was
spilled in the struggle over hallowed ground. Caterpillar earthmovers
came barreling across the prairie. A small army of attack dogs and their
handlers, private security hired by DAPL, guarded the site, followed
closely by a spotter helicopter whirling above; all of them were ready
for a fight. It was Saturday of Labor Day weekend, a holiday celebrating
the working poor who had picketed and protested (and were beaten and
shot) to win an eight hour workday. But this holiday weekend, it was
unionized pipeline workers who clocked in while Indigenous people formed
a picket line. The Indigenous marchers who showed up that day were
working to protect their lands and watersâthey were Land Defenders and
Water Protectors.47 Workers who cross picket lines, on the other hand,
are called âscabsâ because they undermine working-class solidarity âŠWhen
the Water Protectors saw the heavy machinery that morning turning soil,
it was human remainsâtheir relativesâthat were unearthed. Native people
quickly formed a blockade. The Water Protectors pushed down fences,
throwing themselves in front of bulldozers. A white man jumped from a
truck, spraying a line of women and children with CS gas, a chemical
that burns skin, eyes, and throats and can cause blindness. The
handlersâthe people who train animals to hunt human beings:
manhuntersâsicced attack dogs on the picket line. Blood dripped from the
dogsâ maws.â
In Minnesota we have seen law enforcement take $2.9 million from a
Public Utility Commission escrow account that Enbridge set up. That
account is filled with $4.25 million and has been utilized to directly
desecrate Anishinaabe land with the line 3 project. That same money has
aided in the militarization of county and municipal police forces, with
departments betting on getting new equipment when the new Enbridge money
comes in. ABC reported reimbursements for resorts, stationary patrols,
and âmobile surveillance on multiple believed rally participantsâ
Alot of the tactics used in pipeline opposition work is linked to
anti-logging praxis that grew out of the need to disrupt rampant logging
practices approved by state agencies for energy production, resource
extraction, or weapons testing. The practice of tree sits can be seen
from in the forest of cascadia, atlanta forest, fairy creek, across
Appalachian forests and more. In the struggle of the mountain valley
pipeline across the Appalachian region the Yellow Finch tree-sits
disrupted construction for 932 days.
But movements all around Turtle Island are changing their strategy or
tactic of attack on Wet'suwet'en territory. The company Coastal GasLink
has been trespassing on unceded land and is being defended by land
defenders. They have seen raids on their houses and shelters by the
Royal Canadian Military Police, leaving whole shelters demolished in
their path. Blockades and other disruptions have been popping up all
around Turtle Island with a wonderful culmination of energy landing on
February 17th, 2022. Around 20 individuals sabotage the work site on the
pipeline. They told employees to leave and took $100,000,000 away from a
company that is desecrating lands and perpetuating colonial practices
for profit. All these struggles have found strength in a connection to
the land that the state can never sever, informing networks that can
sustain the kind of resistance that demand a paradigm shift in the
public imagination.
Before we move on from this section about like ongoing resistance, maybe
we should talk a bit about the Ohio State University combined heat and
power plant because, hey, we are in Columbus, Ohio, and there is a
fracked gas plant being built less than a mile away from where we are
producing this issue literally right now. The Ohio State University
plant on West Campus right next to the School of Environment and Natural
Resources to provide heat and power to the new hospital buildings that
they are building using fracked gas.
Is this hypocritical and ridiculous, given their commitment to
sustainability and being carbon free by 2030 or 2050? Yes. Yes, it is.
And we need more students to organize against the fracked gas plant
because the Sierra Club has tried and failed in a more litigious way of
taking them to court.
We tried and failed, as well as organizing with some students because we
didn't get enough people on board and there needs to be a critical mass
because otherwise, like at this point, the gas plant is going to be
built. But when is it going to be decommissioned? Like it needs to
happen soon. It shouldn't even be built in the first place. But more
people need to organize against it, or we will get nowhere.
Today, we're here with Dr. Deondre Smiles joining us in this interview.
Dr. Deondre Smiles, an Indigenous geographer who studies Indigenous
geographies/epistemologies, science and technology studies, and tribal
cultural resource preservation/protection
HNB
We're super excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for
coming.
Dr. Deondre Smiles
Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure to
get to be part of things like this.
HNB
Maybe start off just asking if you could tell us a bit about yourself?
Who are you? And what is your relationship with environmental justice &
the environmental justice movement?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
Sure, I'd be happy to tell you a little bit about myself. So I'm an
assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of
Victoria, which is a lovely public university located up on the west
coast of Canada, up in Victoria, British Columbia. I've been up there
since July. Before that, I was a Ph.D. student and then post-doc here at
Ohio State in the Departments of Geography and Department of History. I
do a lot of work surrounding indigenous governance and critical
indigenous geographies. More specifically, I study the ways that
indigenous contestations over burial grounds and over the treatment of
Indigenous dead can really unlock new political possibilities, both for
the living and the deceased. The living has been the focus of my recent
research, which really focuses on the ways on how we can apply the
lessons from indigenous nations protecting burial grounds and such, and
take that and transfer it over to the ways that they protect the
environment and what we call the more than human. So, yeah, you know,
admittedly, I'm an academic more than more than an activist. I guess in
the traditional sense, a lot of the work that I've done in environmental
justice has been in the academic sphere, but I've been really, really
fortunate to be in contact in collaboration with a lot of folks who have
been doing a lot of work on the ground in these sorts of endeavors.
HNB
Yeah, that's so amazing. It's really great to hear about your work. So
like you mentioned. I know you've moved from Columbus recently, but I
also wanted to ask if you could comment on maybe some of the direct
action that exists in Ohio and the Midwest. You did just mentioned,
you've had a chance to work with people who are on the ground. Could you
comment on that? We did talk a lot about pipeline actions in the first
segment of our show today. So we're just wondering like what are the
challenges in sustaining direct action and resistance in our region
specifically?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
That is a great question, and we happen to live in one of the regions of
North America, which has a lot of stuff going on related to direct
action in the activism, especially surrounding pipelines. I think about
work being done in my home state of Minnesota, for example, surrounding
Enbridge's Line 3.
There's been a lot of things going on here over the last couple of years
surrounding the reconstruction of what Enbridge calls the new Line
three, which they're building through northern Minnesota. The old Line 3
is a 70 plus year old pipeline that is getting close, if not beyond the
end of its service life, and it's sprung multiple leaks over the years,
including what we understand to be the largest inland oil spill in
American history about a little over 30 years ago, up there in northern
Minnesota. And, you know, people are familiar with Line 3.
They're familiar with the stuff surrounding DAPL
Line five across the Mackinac Straits here in Michigan. But also there's
other things that kind of exist, kind of more below the surface rights
of a lot of energy resources flow through states such as Ohio, where
fracking and the oil and gas industry have very, very deep roots.
Here even is close is, say, places like the Ohio State University. I
know one of the examples of direct action that I was in proximity to
when I was here as a postdoc was the push against the building of a
power plant on campus. one of the things where students felt really
strongly about that. So there's a lot of work going on in indigenous and
non-Indigenous contexts in the region. And, you know, it varies in
public consciousness, right? Like I said, things like DAPL & Line # are
very, very visible.
But there's also the really subtle ways that these sorts of things move
across space. I teach a course called Indigenous Environmental Activism,
both at UVA can. I also first started at OSU and I asked the students at
OSU to do an assignment. They pulled up a map on this software called
ArcGIS online, and I had them add a map layer of pipelines to the map
and I asked them, you know, take a look at how close these pipelines
come to your homes.
And a lot of the students are actually really quite surprised. I was in
a city like Columbus. We actually have a lot of these pipelines that
move really, really close to this major metropolitan area of 2 million
people. So all of this is to say that this is a region for a lot of
direct action for really, really important reasons.
HNB
And I think it's important that we're taking a land based approach,
especially as anti-colonial academics and activists. That means
centering a land back movement and all of what we're doing. So like,
what kind of state co-optation do you foresee that we need to be weary
of?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
Yeah, so that's a really, really good question, and that's something to
be really, really mindful of. The state has a long history of
infiltrating activist movements and trying to co-opt messages and trying
to make them less potent, right?
So what I mean by less potent is trying to reshape aims into ones that
do not directly threaten hegemony, do not directly threaten capital, do
not directly threaten the relationship between the states and the energy
industry. I think one of the biggest things is keeping the sounds really
quite simple but I can unpack this. It really keeping the eye on the
prize if land back is a goal than really thinking about, well, how is it
that we can? And I say âweâ I mean, these movements can transfer, you
know, privilege and land back to indigenous nations. And how can these
movements uphold indigenous viewpoints? And how can they do so in a way
that is not sanitized right now? Can they do so in ways that don't
follow what I like to call this very liberal framework of recognition
and co-optation where indigenous viewpoints just happen to be in sync
with the desires of the state and the desires of capitalism versus these
broader systems of abolition and sovereignty and resurgence that really,
quite honestly threaten to rupture these systems and then this really
positive generative way?
HNB
Absolutely. So kind of going back to the comment that we keep bringing
up about co-optation, like throughout the EJ movement, there has been a
reflection that there is more of a need for direct action. And like in
the EJ movement, direct action has kind of fallen out of the line of our
current environmental organizing. But I'm wondering if that's true if we
consider the sustained presence of indigenous resistance to neo
colonialism as within this realm of struggles? Like what are examples of
direct actions taken in the last five, ten years? You kind of have
talked about some already, but what does that mean for building
momentum? And like, how do we get back to that away from this attempt at
co-optation of our movement?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
So one of the central pillars of the research that I do and and more
broadly, the ways that we have talked about indigenous resistance and
resurgence among indigenous circles here in the past couple of decades
are really focuses on instead of direct action and indirect action
focuses on these frameworks of every day versus, what I would call,
spectacular action. So when we think about blockades, we think about the
pipeline protest. We think about, you know, people getting arrested up
in places like northern Minnesota protesting, you know, pipelines that's
what we would call very spectacular action. It's action that is made to
be visible. It's action that is made to grab people's attention. And
that is really good. It's really good at getting in the media. It's
really good at grabbing the everyday Americans attention for better or
for worse.
But it also becomes really easy for the state to kind of co-opt these
sorts of things and to just painted as just simple protest or painted as
criminal activity. I think about a lot of the anti-protest laws that are
increasingly being signed into law across the U.S. When we think about
more everyday, mundane actions, I think this is where we start to see
actions that the states cannot co-opt quite easily, right? And so I talk
to my students and I say, what would it look like if we were to view the
act of waking up and going about our everyday lives as a form of
resistance, right? What would it look like to take any sort of action
that we do in our daily or weekly or, day to day everyday, you know,
routines that we don't give a second thought to what would happen if we
approach that as a form of activism? That's something that I really
encourage my students and encourage people more broadly to think about
when it comes to indigenous resistance and resurgence as a whole, but
also activism as a whole. I think direct action, by its very definition
right, means very sustained, very targeted action towards a given goal.
In a capitalistic society where our very existence is generally ground
down into, to use Marxist language, here into this system where we're
selling our labor power to capitalists, to the states, right? And our
daily routine is built around that. What would it look like for us to
just take a step out of that out of that routine?
What might that look like for direct resistance? I'll use indigenous
examples as one of the key example in the logics of the colonial state,
of the settler colonial state. Indigenous peoples like myself are where
we're not supposed to be here right now. We were supposed to be
assimilated out of society and our political systems and our cultural
systems are supposed to be gone. So by very definition, me waking up in
the morning and me sitting here in the studio with you talking about
indigenous viewpoints, is an example of direct action that is very
mundane and quotidian. I don't mean mundane and like the negative
connotation, but it's something like, I wouldn't think twice about doing
this sort of thing. But in logicâs where I'm not supposed to be here
talking to you right now, my people's lands are supposed to be divvied
up already and open for exploitation, and it's not. That is a very, very
powerful form of direct action. And I think that's something that I
really encourage people to take a look at like, get out there in the
streets, protests, do blockades, do what you need to do, but also be
mindful of the very everyday activities that can be very direct
challenges to this hegemonic capitalism as well.
HNB
I love that kind of touches on our next question, which is breaking
these colonial logics and this like state codified and bolstering of
human centered frameworks of life commonly known as the Anthropocene.
What sort of systems and networks we can be forming, like we are today
to sustain not only a spirit of resistance, but of self-determination
that can have a real felt impact on the empire.
Dr. Deondre Smiles
So in what we call the Anthropocene or really what I think scholars are
more appropriately calling the capitalocene nowadays, it's not only
human focus, but it's very individual focus where it's it's it's very
personal centered view about how we go through the world and how we
interact and how we consume things. One of the first steps is to really
think about accountability is to the communities that we're a part of,
right? Not just our political communities, but even communities like
family and friends and networks of comradeship and activism, because
collective bonds are really important for breaking down that form of
hegemonic kind of control. Because when you start to think about the
collective as a whole and you start thinking about just yourself, you
think more about really generative activities that can benefit
everybody, right? I mean, we see this just, you know, when we think
about generosity in basic care work and influences of that nature. So
that's one step on the other. The next step. It can take many different
forms. I can only really speak for my own people's viewpoints. Our world
view is that we have deep accountabilities to what I would call our more
than human relatives; plants, animals, the water, the broader
environments of our creation story talks about this.
Our creation story, as I always tell it, every time I give any kind of
at the beginning of a class that I teach on the environment or any guest
lecturer I do on the environment and one of the most important things.
And you know, obviously if we time preclude three from reading the
entire story here. But one of the most important things is that I point
out that I don't talk about humans anywhere in the story. Like, I point
that out. I say, I tell this beautiful story about the creation of
Turtle Island, and I say, you notice I didn't mention humans, and I ask
them, Well, why might that be? And of course, like the students or
audience members will generally, unless they're Ojibwe, they're probably
not going to know the answer. And I say that's because in our worldview,
humans are the least important part of the ecosystem, right? And I don't
mean that in some kind of what sometimes gets co-opted like a
neo-malthusian kind of way where it's like,
Oh, well, humans need to be depopulated, but it's it's more like because
if we are the least important part of the ecosystem that places are more
than human relatives on a higher plane of accountability, riots where we
recognize that really are more than human relatives are the are the
framework are the bedrock of what holds the world together and that we
need to protect them and we need to defend them just like we would
defend our own human relatives. And I think when you take a look at it
from that kind of viewpoint, they're actually quite easy, right? I mean,
we would all I won't assume listeners family dynamics, right? But I
think many people will have, you know, they'd have a family member
that's like they're ride or die right. The people that like they would
that they would they would they would gladly protect. And it's like,
Well, if you view the water like that, if you view the plants and trees
and flowers like that, if you view animals like that, it becomes a lot
easier to be able to, you know, reconcile yourself with that kind of
framework about what can I do that is best for them in the long run, not
just myself.
HNB
My next question draws on some of the themes that you've been teaching
on, which is how can settlers draw from indigenous knowledge systems in
a way so that the newly built or modified systems and networks are
coming up and being fostered in a way and that are non domineering and
not only intent, but in effect as well, while respecting the ever
expanding cultural sovereignty and autonomy of the individuals and
communities involved with such growth models?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
I think probably the most important thing is to not center oneself in
these sorts of dynamics. In the modern environmental movement, in the
historical environmental movements, we see these kind of parallel trends
where settlers all of a sudden discover, Oh, hey, where we are fucking
up the environmental right? And therefore we need to do something about
it. And then it turns into these problematic things where it becomes I'm
dictating to other people how to go about being in relation with the
environment. And a lot of times when indigenous knowledge is consumed by
settlers, it becomes something where they make it about themselves. And
I really, really urge people to not do that. I urge people to listen to,
you know, to do the internal work that they need to do to work through
these things on on their own, that they know to draw indigenous peoples
into this position where they need to be teaching settlers all these
things and expanding a bunch of labor to do so and really to, you know,
internalize these things and apply it to their own kind of personal
context. Right? That that's one of the things that sometimes has
happened in indigenous environmental movements as settlers will come in
and. To learn these things, and they're like, OK, this is great. So I,
you know, I learn these things, and now I'm going to take this kind of
leadership role because I've gone through this process of self
transformation and therefore, I'm going to help you to do the sorts of
things in indigenous nations and indigenous movements don't need help
right there. They're generally going to be pretty savvy about what it is
that they need to do. They don't need, they don't need leaders because
they're leading themselves. That they need people to do is to be there
on the ground with them and to listen and know when to take a step back
and when to use their privilege in ways that can really assist these
movements in ways that they may not be able to break through on their
own.
HNB
Thank you so much. Mm-Hmm. This has been such a gift to be able to
interview with you. We just have one last question about the show. So
the title of the show is hot and bothered, cultivating sustainable
resistance, and we were just wondering if you could reflect on that a
little bit. What do you take away from that? What are your reflections
on cultivating sustainable resistance?
Dr. Deondre Smiles
I really like to think about it in terms of how one can take care of
oneself and nourish themselves in this sort of thing. So a number of
years ago, Winona LaDuke, who is a hero of mine and somebody I look up
to very immensely, came to Ohio State and gave a talk. And she said, You
know, if you didn't get arrested at Standing Rock, come up to northern
Minnesota and you can get a chance to be on the front lines with us and
get arrested. And I thought that was really, really cool at first. And
then after a while. I kind of took a step back and I'm like, Well, what
if folks can't be out there on the front lines, right? What if it could
be potentially harmful for them to do so? And that's a question that my
students would often ask me. They'd say, Well, you know, I can't, I
can't go up in protest. What can I do? And I start to point out, you
know, there's other ways that you can engage in activism in ways that
are not on the front lines or like donating time and money and other
sorts of things, but also for anybody that's involved in these
movements, not only on the front lines but also in, you know, behind the
front lines, doing the support work, you've got to take care of
yourself. This work is really that work is really heavy. It can take a
lot out of you and you are not going to be any good to anybody. If
you're not nourishing yourself and not doing the work that you need to
do to make sure that you are approaching it with all of your mind and
body and spirit. So it sounds kind of weird, right? Because I think
people would be like, Oh, what can I do? Like when they asked for advice
on how to sustain their activism. You know, it's not just, oh, donate x
amount of money or take off a month to go up to a protest camp and do
this. It's also like make sure you're getting sleep, make sure that
you're taking care of yourself. Make sure you're eating. Make sure that
you have somebody that you can talk to to debrief and like, you know,
process things because, you know, it's not, you know, the individual.
You know, I just got done talking about the ways that we need to think
about the collective. Individual self-care is really, really important
in this kind of work, too. You don't want to build a movement that will
just self-destruct because everybody's burnt out, right? You want to
make sure that people are able to sustain it for the long run, and you
can't do that without taking care of yourself.
HNB
If you would like to follow Deondre's work, you can visit his website
Deondresmiles.com, and follow him on Twitter at Deondre Smiles. OK, so
we're here at the end of the show time for our call to action. How
appropriate would it be for this show for us to focus our call to action
on pipelines
â Mvp can be supported through their page appalachian against pipelines
on facebook, twitter and instagram
â Line 3&5 information can be found at stopline3.org resistline3.org and
updates can be found on the migizi will fly accounts of instagram and
facebook, talongside reports in the resistline 3 twitter account
â Fairy creek- old growth forest facing logging on indigenous land can
find more information at rainbow flying squad on instagram or their
website with updates posted on their faircreek blockade accounts on
instagram and facebook.
â Thacker pass sugar bush crew, natives have been facing evictions for
lithium mine man camp and BIA used to enforce
Enbridge encroachment on to Karankawa land held space in february
against the proposed enbridge project, more information can be found on
the pages of the Indigenous people of the coastal bend on instagram
@indigenous_peoples_361
So in reference to the ArcGIS map that Deondre mentioned earlier in the
interview, it would also be important for listeners to familiarize
themselves with the pipelines surrounding your own neighborhood. Before
the interview I was actually going to just encourage people to look it
up but now Iâm like, really excited that there is already a tool that
exists that can help people discover the existence of pipelines in their
close vicinity so everyone should go check that out.
Shout out to specifically Dr. Deondre Smile's, Dr. Laura Pulido, who we
mentioned Dr. Kelly Crenshaw, Dr. Nick Estes and Horatio Trujillo for
inspiring and contributing their knowledge, I guess in an indirect way
to the production of the show.