We win when we fight back
For two years, Honor the Earth has been supporting the Westwin Resistance, an Indigenous-femme-led grassroots movement of concerned Tribal relatives and Oklahomans who have been fighting the building of a cobalt and nickel refinery on ancestral lands of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Caddo, Wichita, and Delaware.
In December, Westwin Elements, the company proposing the refinery, finally backed off from its extractive plans. After nearly two years of local pushback and grassroot organizing, Westwin decided NOT to move forward with a large-scale commercial refinery in Lawton, OK, a victory for the local community
The path to that victory was not linear, and it wasn’t always clear.
“There was never a pivotal moment. Instead it was more like ping pong,” says Kaysa Whitley, Coalition Coordinator for Westwin Resistance. “There was a moment where we would think we had it, and then there was a moment they’d come swinging out the gate with a surprise.”
It’s hard to quantify the amount of work that went into organizing against the refinery because so much of it happened behind the scenes, she says.
“With grassroots organizing, you basically just have to take up whatever mantle is thrown at you,” says Kaysa. “One day, that might mean becoming knowledgeable about tribal politics. The next day, it could mean a deep dive into water testing, municipal infrastructure, environmental regulations, or data analysis.”
We worked closely with Westwin Resistance since their inception, developing an organizing structure; providing communications support including core messaging, press releases, webinars, a website and billboard; connecting them to local and national coalition building resources, and providing fiscal support.
Honor the Earth’s deep history of organizing against other extractive industries helped the Westwin Coalition win this struggle much faster and more effectively than they would have been able to alone, Kaysa says. She and her fellow organizers didn’t have to start from scratch. They were able to pool existing knowledge from other Indigenous organizers in order to hit the ground running.
“As Indigenous people, our resilience has always been stronger and longer than any one organization,” she says. “Would we have been able to fight this on our own? Yes, we would have. But it would have been much harder.”
“It wouldn’t have been impossible, but it would have taken longer,” Kaysa says. “Buying that time, having that knowledge, is the thing that wins fights.”
Honor the Earth has launched a comprehensive toolkit to help organizers fight back against data centers on Indigenous lands. The kit includes fact sheets, questions to ask data center developers, a presentation template, a map of proposed data centers across Turtle Island, and more. Check it out here!