A theme that comes up over and over again if you look at environmental protest throughout history is the way it often intersects with the fight for indigenous sovereignty and the way that makes the backlash to protest more severe. From Ochetti Chakwan people in the US to the Wetsuweten in Canada, the link of people in Honduras the Tuhoi
in New Zealand. Indigenous led efforts to stop environmentally harmful projects often help drive wider movements for Native people's rights, and when the backlash comes, efforts to repress environmental activism end up targeting indigenous rights movements too.
This is Nick ASTs I am an assistant professor American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, co founder of That Nation. I'm also an Enrold member of the Lower Brules Siu tribe.
Nick Astes was deeply involved in protests at the Standing Rocksioux Indian Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which a lot of people pinpoint as a key starting point of the modern climate movement in the US, and it was a really big deal. Thousands of people from all over the world showed up in North Dakota to protest the pipeline and stand up for Indigenous land and water rights.
There were celebrities there too, politicians. Alexandria Okazio Cortes has cited it as the moment that sort of radicalized her in the climate fight. People camped out for months, They participated in multiple direct actions, and the police response was intense. There was militarized gear and helicopters, attack dogs, private security forces from the pipeline company, and even counter insurgency tactics that were being used to try to deter and suppress protest.
Standing Rock protests were also explicitly cited when politicians started to pass laws criminalizing protests in the years following it. It became a verb people said they didn't want to get Standing rocked. Despite its significance, Es does sees Standing Rock as more of a continuation of a century's long battle for indigenous sovereignty.
This country not only exported war, but had been sort of founded on a longer war called the US Indian Wars the nineteenth century. I would argue that it continued very much into the twentieth century, and the manifestations of which are also very prevalent. In the way that police agencies throughout the country track, surveil and police Indigenous led movements.
He also sees it as the culmination of a more recent fight to protect Native land and water rights that have been going on for several years. Before the Standing Rock protest began in twenty sixteen.
Back in the early twenty tens, I had been getting involved in local tribal politics and things that were happening on the reservations. There were other protests that were going on. The IRS threatened to seize land from the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, and it was in the middle of winter. I remember Brandon Sazu, who was a tribal chairman at
the time. He later went to Standing Rock. You know, he was in a trailer by himself in the middle of a snowstorm, and we used to go and bring him coffee, and he was on a trailer on that land that they were supposed to seize.
Sazu camped out in that trailer to block the IRS from seizing the land it was on. And during those same years there were various fights over tribal water rights too.
There was always a question around the jurisdiction over the River control of the river and water rights, especially for the Lakota To and Dell Khota reservations on Mini Shoche the Missouri River, and there was a consciousness around it because the Army corp of Engineers kind of abolished our jurisdiction and then asserted its own and then sort of has say over flowage and what kind of erosion prevention
are put on the river. And it may seem like sort of a mundane kind of thing, but back in twenty eleven there was massive flooding in the Missouri River basin and the Army Coorp of Engineers sort of patted itself on the back and said, hey, we did a really good job managing the floods and had it not been for these dams, we would have lost lives. And there were no lives lost. But that's actually not true.
There were at least half a dozen lives lost in my reservation because of infrastructure being damaged because of floods.
So there were these long standing issues between the tribes and the US government over water rights. And then in twenty eleven, the Keystone Excel pipeline united indigenous opponents in the US and Canada.
You had tribes coming from our first nations, coming from Canada and talking about the destruction of their homelands from Tarzan's extraction that was happening in Alberta, and they signed a treaty to protect the sacred down in the Hunkdawah country on the Inkton Reservation, where they all committed, including the Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association which our tribe is Party two, as well to prevent Tarzan's transportation cross a
treaty territories. But that's a pretty bold move. I mean, there's like very few things in Indian country that unite grassroots people and tribal chairmans like that we can all kind of agree on.
That fight was ultimately successful, but it went back and forth for a decade. I and just finally canceled the permit for the Keystone Excel pipeline in twenty one, and of course five years before that, Standing Rock began.
Standing Rock is an interesting case because Standing Rock, you know, historically has been united in the sense that it allies itself, The council allies itself with the grassroots people, and so they were you know, inviting people in. We didn't just show up uninvited. There was a public invitation and there's a public sort of hosting of people in this particular space, and they found land that was belonging to the Core of Engineers that you know, we we had never formally
ceded to the Core of Engineers. So when we look at Standing Rock in that in that context, just by asserting treaty authority, just by asserting our right to exist and to you know, live by the laws that we determined for ourselves, not somebody from the outside, that becomes a criminal act. It's actually just like criminalizing Deocheti Shakoye train to make being a water protector in an illegal act.
The intense push by the fossil fuel industry to criminalize protest in the wake of Standing Rock was very much in line with how the industry has dealt with indigenous protests in other countries, so much so that it was a topic of conversation around the fire at one of the Standing Rock protest camps.
So in twenty sixteen, I visited Standing Rock during the height of the protests against the Code Access pipeline.
This is Lindsay Ophrius, an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker who's making a film about how laws are used to suppress protests. She traveled to Standing Rock with two land defenders and leaders of the Sequoia people in Ecuador who had been fighting first Texaco and then Chevron over oil spilled and dumped throughout the Amazon there for decades.
So two of those people, Umberto Piaguaffe and Hornman zan Brano. I went with them to Standing Up in twenty sixteen.
Part of the idea was for coalition building.
And also trying to think about what is possible outside or beyond the whole wartex of the law that kind of sucks everything into it. And so something that I will always remember is that around the fire went evening where you know, everybody would come and sider around the fire and share stories, and Bertha and Carmon gave kind of like a warning about what they had gone through, and you know that it's likely to come to pass once again now that this RICO precedent has been set.
RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was created to prosecute the mafia in the US. It's been used in civil cases too, to go after white collar crime and prosecute corporate corruption. It had some surprising usage in legal battles around climate change and protest as well. It was used against Umberto and Carmen and their co plaintiffs in Ecuador to block them from collecting a settlement after they defeated Chevron in court. That case stemmed from a
decades long fight with first Texaco and then Chevron. It began all the way back in the nineteen sixties when the American oil company Texico brought the oil business deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon, disrupting centuries of indigenous culture and tradition.
The indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the Warani, the Kofar, and other indigenous peoples. They lived in a pristine rainforest environment prior to the arrival of Texaco and the oil boomen in Ecuador in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies.
This is Marcos Oriana, an international law expert, professor at American University and the UN Special Rapperture on Toxics and Human Rights.
The extraction of oil by tex and Petro Ecuador was without regard to the protection of the environment. It was without regard to the rights of affected indigenous peoples. First operated by Texaco as I mentioned, and then taken over by Petro Ecuador. Oil operations severely impacted indigenous people's traditional lands. The oil boom in Ecuador has imposed loss of life, health, territory, and culture. Indigenous peoples have not received reparation for the violation of their rights.
When the Sequoia and Kofan tribes banded together with local farmers to sue Texaco, which later became Chevron, for the damage that had been caused in the Amazon, they won, and then the oil company immediately accused them of corruption and collusion and held up the settlement. In a decades long RICO case back in the United States, they have still not collected that settlement. It turns out Umberto and Carmen's warning was prescient. Some twenty years after their ordeal began,
a similar thing happened to Standing Rock protesters. Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline company, tried to use RICO against individual water protectors and nonprofits like Greenpeace.
In August of twenty seventeen, of student was filed by Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, and this was for three hundred million dollars for allegedly orchestrating their resistance at Standing Rock.
DEEPA. Padmanaba is Deputy General Counsel for Greenpeace USA.
Energy Transfer brought claims under the Federal Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO, and as many no. RICO was a law that was created to go after the mafia for organized crime. And what made RICO even more dangerous was that it allowed for the recovery of treble damages. So we were suddenly looking at an almost one billion dollar lawsuit. An energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy worked to uplift Indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime.
But all the court cases and laws that were passed in the week of Standing Rock could not stop the one thing that oil company executives and right wing politicians seemed absolutely terrified of Indigenous people and allies of all kinds rising up against them.
The subversive nature being a water protector isn't just because you know, the Ocheti Shakoi was leading this resistance again against a pipeline, but they were also creating a sort of universal identity that was grounded in Indigenous values but didn't necessarily mean it was just for Indigenous people, because anybody who walked through the gates of you know, o chet Tischau Coin Camp or Secret Stone Camp, became a water protector by default.
Esta says this sort of resistance was prophecied a long time ago.
The black snake prophecy comes from several sources, but one of them it has to do with the mini shoche the Missouri River, and there were ideas that what they call it inchegular uti, which are like essentially water monsters, snakes were kind of banished to the river and then also sort of promised their return and they would come back as a black snake. And you know, I don't
think a lot of people really fully understood it. And but LaDonna brab bol Aller told me is that at one point people thought it was the Interstates because they were using a lot of asphalt. But then when the oil pipelines are being built, it was like, oh, yeah, this is like in some ways like dinosaur blood.
You know.
So the prophecy, as it was told during these times, would actually unite people in a kind of historic resistance, and it would unite all people, not just the Ochetti Shakoi. So as Phyllis Jung said, the Hung Papa oyaate was, you know, the horn of the buffalo or the horn of the camp circled the Ochetti shaky, and they would be sort of the vanguard of the nation. But also this movement, I think there's you know, some truth to that.
The connection of the pipeline fights to the fight for indigenous sovereignty really seemed to supercharge the industry's response, which makes sense if you look at how entwined the industry's history has been with colonialism. In his book Anointed by Oil, historian Darren Dochuk at Notre Dame University chronicled how US oil mean dealt with indigenous nations both in the US and when they first started to look beyond the country's
borders for oil. One key tactic was to connect fossil fuel extraction with religion.
These missionaries are pushing into the jungles of the Amazon. They are coming in direct contact with petroleum geologists, for instance, the Standard Oil Company, and they are going to collaborate. They are going to partner in terms of the flow of information, and the information is going to be about the environment. It's going to be about the ecology that
they're encountering. It's also going to be anthropological. Both classes of explorers are going to be deeply invested in trying to understand the people that they are encountering in these regions and all with hopes of trying to get information from them to be able to kind of plumb the
earth in a profitable way. So it really accelerates in the nineteen twenties and moving into the nineteen fifties in the Cold War period, this pursuit of gold is going to be all the more intensified against the backdrop of the Cold War and the fight with communism, in the fear that Latin America might lose itself to the great secular communist threat of the Soviet Union. So oil and pursuit of souls is going to become all the more important.
Author lawyer and law professor Judith Kimberling documented similar behavior in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the nineteen seventies.
One of the groups the by WAYETI. They had no contact with the outside world until nineteen seventy, and they were subjected to a program a forced contact because after Textco discovered commercial quantities of oil and Lago Lagrio, the company knew that it.
Would want to expand its operations into War II territory, and the war Any who lived in those areas had no contact with the outside world. The company collaborated with US missionaries and Nequwar's government to subject the Warani to a forced contact. The missionaries would get into planes Texico's plans, they would fly over the forest, they would look for Warani houses. I've actually heard reports too that they threw dynamite out of the planes to try to scare the
Warani away. And of course the missionaries wanted the Waronis to come live with them in settlements because the Warani were nomadic semi nomadic people, so the missionaries wanted them to live in permanent settlements with the missionaries and the cam Christian Texico just wanted them out of the areas where they wanted to operate, and you know, the government of wanted Texico to be able to find more oil and extract more oil.
What we've seen from Ecuador to Standing Rock, India, to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria to British Columbia is that when indigenous peoples fight back against the plundering of their land, the backlash is swift, often violent, and comes with a huge side of colonialist entitlement. Today, we're going to travel to the Brazilian Amazon, where the uru Wahwau people are trying to defend the last of their territory from agribusiness and logging.
The excellent team behind the national geographic documentary The Territory have shared footage with us to help tell that story that's coming up after this quick break. This has drilled the real free speech threat. I'm Amy Westervelt. Stay with us. In the heart of the Amazon, the urdu Wahwau people have seen their community decline from thousands to just around
two hundred people. Those remaining descendants are trying to hold onto and protect the tribe's ancestral lands in the Amazon, which faces increasing threats from the country's large agricultural industry. The big agricultural companies know better than to go after indigenous rights directly. Instead, they pay small farmers to sneak into protected territory, slash and burn, and set up homesteads.
Once they've made inroads, the big companies come in and take over, clearing large segments of the forest to either grow soybeans or graze cattle. The documentary The Territory documents the fight between farmers and the tribe, particularly under former Brazilian president JayR. Bosonato, who made undermining the rights of indigenous people part of his platform.
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This is bita Te, a young Udawawaw leader. He says non indigenous people always say the same thing, that Indigenous people have too much land and that we should clear the trees and raise cattle. But I don't agree. He says, the forest and the rivers are our home. They support us. Alternating between footage of the Urduwahwau and some of the settlers and farmers trying to invade their land, the film highlights themes we see turning up in every environmental fight.
After we hear from Bitaate, we meet Serhio, a farmer who talks about the forest as prime farmland that shouldn't just go to waste, and the indigenous people aren't doing anything with the land. Sergio says they're not planting, they're
not producing. All they do is live there. Robert Miller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe and a professor of Indian law at Arizonia State University, says the tension between settlers and indigenous people over living in relationship with the land versus extracting from it has been going on since colonization began.
The doctrine of discovery is one of the original international law doctrines that was developed in the fourteen hundreds to control the actions of European Christian nations. As Europeans began to sail outside the site of land, they began to be interested in acquiring empires in Africa and then into the Americas and into Asia. They very rarely found lands that were truly vacant. They were claiming the lands of indigenous peoples Africa, in the Americas, and in Asia. So
it wasn't finders keepers, losers weeper. Here's a lost piece of property, I pick it up, I look around, there's nobody to claim it, so it's mine. No, they were mostly claiming settled lands where cultures and nations had lived for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The justification was Christianity and civilization, and it's hard to even understand what that means. But the civilization of Europe was somehow superior to that of every other indigenous peoples around the world.
I mean, today it's ludicrous to even say that, but those were the justifications. That God wanted European Christians to own these lands, and that the Christian God intended that, and somehow Christian Europeans were superior to everyone around the world.
As Europeans began colonizing various places, philosophers like John Locke also justified the taking of indigenous lands by describing it as empty land. According to Locke, if land was not being farmed or used in some other way, it was empty.
Terranellius is a Latin phrase meaning empty land. That's exactly what John Locke was writing about. That's exactly what most Europeans assumed. They assumed the lands around the world was vacant. They could come here and make it their own by applying their labor to it.
In the territory, we watch as the udu Wawaw make use of the land too. They fish, they bathe in the river, they drink the water. They weave roofs and baskets out of palm fronds, but the forest remains intact. When settlers and farmers come in, they use chainsaws to chop down trees and light fire to large areas of land to clear it. It's really striking to see the visual contrast between these two opposing views of humanity's relationship
with nature. When farmers illegally farm in protected indigenous regions, they claim it's because they are poor and need the land. But Nadinya, a local environmentalist who fights alongside the Uduwawau and has for decades, says the farmer stories are not entirely truthful.
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As a good, but they are often financed by Brazil's major agribusiness landowners, so once the small farmers complete the first invasion into the forest, these large landowners will take over and clear the rest. As invasions increase and the Indigenous Affairs Agency starts telling the news that nothing is happening, that the invasions are being made up by the indigenous people, the tribe's new young leader beat the they comes up with a novel idea, perhaps cameras are more powerful than
arrows or machetes. Pulling together a tribal patrol, he sets out into the forest, using drones to track invasions, and then documents all the evidence. The patrol finds and arrests some thirty people that they call invaders that they tells them, we don't want to hurt you, but you can't be here. Everyone knows this is indigenous territory. The media picks up the story and the local group of farmers that had been trying to take over part of the territory loses
its political support. They disband. Don't worry. I've left plenty of twists and turns out here because I think everyone see this film. This part of the documentary chronicles a huge win, which you don't always get in these sorts of stories. Despite that, the udu Wawa's future still feels pretty precarious. Bolsonaro is out of office now, but Bolsonarismo is going strong. At one point in the film, a settler references the Bible and his faith that this land
is his. When his homestead is found and burned down by Betat's patrol, he vows to keep rebuilding it. Still, the country's new president does seem committed to supporting indigenous rights and stopping deforestation, and so far the numbers are promising. In President Lula de Silva's first six months in office, deforestation dropped by more than a third. Will it be enough, We'll have to watch and see. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our senior editor for this series is
Allen Brown. Senior producer and sound designer is Martin Saltz Ostwick, who also composed much of the music in this episode. Additional music composed by Peter Duff, who mixed and mastered the episode.
Fact checking by Woodan Jan Legal review by James Wheeton.
The show is reported and written by me Amy Westerbolt.
Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by four Known. The show was created by Amy Westerveldt.
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