Crow & Lummi, Dirty Coal & Clean Fishing

- Winona LaDuke

“The tide is out and the table is set…” Justin Finkbonner gestures to the straits on the edge of the Lummi reservation. This is the place where the Lummi people have gathered their food for a millennium. It is a fragile and bountiful ecosystem, part of the Salish Sea, newly corrected in it’s naming by cartographers. When the tide goes out, the Lummi fishing people go to their boats—one of the largest fishing fleets in any Indigenous community. They feed their families, and they fish for their economy.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Honor the Earth, in collaboration with the Headwaters Fund, the Indigo Girls, Medicine for the People, and a number of individual and institutional donors, are pleased to announce grants of $120,000 to Indigenous grassroots organizations across North America. We are tremendously grateful to our Board of Directors, and our donors for making it all possible.  In this grant cycle, we’ve been able to support organizations working in restorative agriculture, honoring traditional cultural practices, protection of sacred sites, and in opposition to destruction of water, land and life. 

We did a study on the White Earth Reservation in 2008 where we interviewed about 200 households, and asked people where they shopped, when they did. We found that our community spent around eight million dollars a year on food purchases for households and tribal programs.  Seven million of those dollars went off reservation to companies like Walmart, Food Service of America, and Sysco. On top of that, the money we spent on reservation was largely sucked up by convenience stores, where we purchased really cool stuff like pop, chips, microwavable pizzas, and baked goods.

So, what are the consequences of this?

“Seems like people don’t want to stick around another thousand years.”    —Mike Wiggins, Tribal Chairman of the Bad River Band of Anishinaabe, on the proposed GTAC taconite mine, which will impact the watershed of the Bad River.

Let’s say that is not true.  Let’s say that we are people who want to live in a way that restores our relationship with Mother Earth. We want to live in small, medium, and large communities, with a low fossil fuel impact on the world.

In the North, our land and water - lifeblood of the Anishinaabeg peoples - sustains and nourishes us. One-fifth of the world's fresh surface water supply lies here and it is worth protecting. But our land and water are being threatened by:

• Enbridge pipelines transporting ever larger amounts of Tar Sands oil (and also toxic lighter “diluents”) across Minnesota.
• Including permits sought by Calumet Refinery to ship oil on Lake Superior.

Our sacred "Wild Rice Beds,” Lakes and Rivers are precious and our Regional Fisheries generate $7.2 billion annually and support 49,000 jobs. But now Enbridge Inc., responsible for the largest on-land spill in U.S. history, wants to increase the amount of Alberta Tar Sands Diluted Bitumen (DilBit) in its Alberta Clipper pipeline to a maximum of 880,000 barrels a day. Already 1.7 million barrels of oil flow through and across Minnesota daily, but even this is not enough. Increasing the amount of Alberta Tar Sands Diluted Bitumen through Minnesota holds with it an unacceptable level of environmental risks.

Honor the Earth staff and Board wish to thank the many musicians, volunteers and people who came to our three shows- Madison, St. Paul and Bayfield. We had a beautiful journey.

The voice of Jennifer Kreisberg rang, music of Kelly Jackson (Nammy Award Winner 2013) in Madison, echoed strong, and we always thank the Indigo Girls. At this show, Bad River Anishinaabe Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins addressed a sold out crowd and encouraged continued resistance to the GTAC taconite mine proposal.

Honor the Earth is proud to be partnered with Eco- Cheyenne, in the continuing struggle of the Northern Cheyenne to keep their homeland safe. The Northern Cheyenne wish to keep Arch Coal from their sacred Tongue River and Otter Creek territory. They also continue their opposition to the Tongue River Railroad proposal at the Otter Creek. Its a bad idea, there is no train, and there is no mine.

White Earth Reservation, MN - September 5th, 2013 - On Wednesday, September 4th the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission voted to authorize a contested case review on the expansion of the “Alberta Clipper” pipeline, also known as Line 67, which is owned by Enbridge Inc. Enbridge plans to invest $159 million in extra pumping stations to increase capacity by 40 percent to 800,000 barrels per day. In July, Enbridge won PUC approval for a smaller capacity increase in which Honor the Earth’s executive director, Winona LaDuke put forward testimony opposing such actions:

“In the far back times of the Dine people, monsters roamed the lands. And in those times, there were great beings who were called upon to slay the monsters. We need some modern-era monster slayers….” —Anna Rondon, Dine

The Public is a bit unruly sometimes. But it was an abrupt move, by Minnesota Public Utilities Chairwoman to deny any testimony to a packed hearing room in the Enbridge pipeline expansion case. I was , well, shocked.