‘Tis the Season to Talk Climate Collapse, Nuclear Colonialism, and Freeing Leonard Peltier
Leavenworth Federal Prison, 1992.
I don’t know about you, but personally, the whole festive holiday thing seems to be falling a bit flat this year. Don’t get me wrong, like every other year, I do plan to really go to town on a pumpkin pie or two. But this year, the annual deluge of Black Friday ads egging us on to higher levels of consumption–with corresponding carbon emissions and solid and liquid waste–seemed particularly hollow, morbid–predatory, even–falling as Black Friday did this year on November 29, the date the U.N. first recognized in 1977 as International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This year all the excess, forced pageantry, and planned obsolescence of Black Friday seems in such stark and ironic contrast to the poverty in Gaza.
From Plymouth to Palestine
Winter is coming soon to Gaza where hundreds of thousands of shell-shocked people are struggling against the odds to care for themselves and their families–from infants to elders and recent amputees on crutches and in wheelchairs, as well as people with other disabilities– eking out lives in the streets, tents, and precarious ruins of shelled out apartments. In The Guardian, Kaamil Ahmed and Ana Lucía González Paz describe Gaza as a “sonic hellscape” filled variously with the “incessant buzzing of drones” and “more violent intrusions: Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people.” And the situation is unlikely to get better under Herr Trump.
The man who as president moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem stands to personally profit from, as reported in The Guardian, investment his son-in-law Jared Kushner has in the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and its development as an Israeli waterfront resort. And no doubt Trump is also well aware of the profits to be had from exploiting Gaza’s offshore marine gas fields. But, if Jewish-led protests at the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, and more recently in the Canadian Parliament, are anything to go by, solidarity actions against the unfolding genocide to Gaza are likely to continue to build in the run up to Hanukkah and the January inauguration.
But in the lead up to Christmas, Joe Biden seems as willing as ever to continue the seemingly limitless supply of U.S. weapons to help annihilate Gaza. I’m just speculating here, (so, please, sir, do not to put me to the dunking stool!) but Jesus himself might be the first to observe that giving birth in a manger sounds pretty idyllic right now to women in Gaza weakened by hunger, giving birth in the rubble of buildings that used to be apartments, universities and hospitals. No sterile sheets, no antiseptic, nothing to dull the pain, nothing to stop the next forced removal, the next relocation. The Palestinian Trail of Tears.
The links between Native American and Palestinian experience being so many and so obvious, it seems fitting that the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People follows so closely on the heels of Thanksgiving, that annual rite of colonial simulacra on such a spectacular national scale that Walt Disney himself would have been proud to call it his brainchild. We’re talking about a holiday that begins indoctrinating American school children, from kindergarten onward, into a history that never was. And for all you teachers out there, I’d be remiss for not noting that, for decades, Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project have been developing K-12 curriculum that centers Native voices, culture, and history, and goes a long way toward puncturing those myths.
Still, far too many Americans remain unaware of the fact that since 1970, the fourth Thursday in November also has been recognized as a “National Day of Mourning,” heralding as it does, the arrival of settlers bent on claiming the land as their own– in the pithy words of the late 19th century colonialist hymn–“from sea to shining sea.” Today we may hear the echo of that much celebrated American phrase in Netanyahu’s and the Likud Party’s longstanding vision of a Jewish state purged of Palestinians, one that extends “between the Sea and the Jordan River.”
Red Power was in the air on Thanksgiving Day in 1970, when Aquinnah Wampanoag activist Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, drafted the speech he planned to deliver on behalf of the United American Indians of New England as an invited guest of settlers gathering at Plymouth. A year earlier on Thanksgiving Day in 1969, 78 Indigenous activists calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes” (IAT), had cast off from San Francisco, disembarking at Alcatraz Island. That act kicked off an internationally visible 19-month long occupation–and standoff with the Feds. When the settlers organizing the event in 1970 got wind of Wamsutta’s speech, they revoked their invitation in an attempt to silence him.
Accumulation By Dispossession
More reason to amplify Wamsutta’s words describing “Thanksgiving Day [as] a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures,” but also of “Native resilience.” You can read the full speech here, including Wamsutta’s call to transform Thanksgiving into a “protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.” It wouldn’t have been too surprising if Palestine was on his mind when Wamsutta issued that global call not four years after the ’67–or Six Days– War, which ended with Israel occupying the “Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and most of Syrian Golan Heights – effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel’s control.” Beginning in the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) saw clear parallels between colonialism on Turtle Island and the Palestinian experience of removal and dispossession.
“Accumulation by dispossession” is how Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the logic of capitalism, which is inextricably linked to colonialism. Throughout history, Indigenous people–from Palestine to the U.S.– have been on the frontlines of dispossession and removal, their lands drowned or exploited for hydropower or contaminated in service of the empire–whether by mine tailings and nuclear waste or bombs, bullets or other forms of military ordinance. And the same hard-hit communities are now on the frontlines of climate collapse, disproportionately hit by rising sea levels, by typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events.
And what was it, anyway, that Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his 1967 Riverside Church speech about the triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism and how they intersect? And would he be surprised today by products moving at the speed of light, millions of us wrapping our arms daily around boxes that many contend are stamped with Jeff Bezos’ male member? What would he have said about Bill Gates injecting markets and mines into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about corporations and militaries jonesing after cobalt, after tantalum, after tin, tungsten, uranium, and gold, after debts and interest, after bodies of children, bodies of water, bodies of workers wearing flip flops into mines?
I write all this as someone who grew up white, middle class, and addicted to oil, plastics, and petrochemicals, someone who basked in endless hours of tv, who marinated in Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in the blue-gray light of frontier myths and the urge to consume. We cut our teeth on the McUsual contemporary drive-by forms of American planetary annihilation. We grew up watching the world rush limitless past the back window of a Ford or Chevy station wagon. And unlike today, we witnessed the wonders of dinosaur piggy banks, Peter Max towels, and steak knives bestowed on us like a benediction every time our parents bought a full tank of gas.
We grew up consuming travel and oxygen, consuming landscapes, countries, cultures, and colonial myths, oblivious to the war in Viet Nam, to sundown towns, and the Green Book. We took cross-country trips and woke bleary-eyed at midnight to stare into the glaring white lights of Mount Rushmore, oblivious to the fact that not far away, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Justice Department and FBI were busy making back door deals with tribal Chair Dickie Wilson and his “Goons,” who terrorized anyone who resisted the U.S.’s right to ravage Lakota land for uranium for bombs and nuclear energy. If, collectively, they had to break a few eggs, heads, bodies, and the crust of the earth, contaminate rivers and streams, and set up Leonard Peltier to get their hands on that uranium, so be it, right?
Nuclear Colonialism v. Red Power
The world has no shortage of political prisoners–or of environmental martyrs and heroes– but 80-year-old Leonard Peltier, a Lakota and Anishinaabe AIM member, is arguably the most famous, the legal lynching he underwent so outrageous, and his incarceration in a “maximum security” prison so protracted. Even former FBI agents have themselves essentially contended that Pelter was scapegoated by the FBI for the lethal shooting of two agents–Jack Coler and Ronald Williams– on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Michael Apted’s 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala, narrated by Robert Redford, is a good place to start if you’re new to this history. But if you’re looking for insights into the role that uranium mining played in the conflict, you’d be better off checking out Peter Matthiessen’s book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on The American Indian Movement. To hear a first-hand account, check out Peltier’s memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.
Despite well-documented prosecutorial misconduct powerfully depicted in Apted’s documentary, Peltier’s conviction has yet to be overturned. And in the face of decades of global, high-profile pleas for clemency for Peltier, including by James Reynolds, a “senior US attorney who was involved in [his] prosecution,” no president up until now has been willing to free Peltier. Given that he’s in increasingly poor health, time is running out, and the same president who just pardoned his own son may be Peltier’s last shot at clemency. If you haven’t yet done so, check out the Amnesty International petition– and Amy Goodman’s and Denis Moynihan’s recent column–making the case for his release. The Red Nation media collective also has an extensive playlist of podcasts focused on Peltier’s case and the long struggle to free him.
Peltier, arguably the world’s most visible casualty of nuclear colonialism, was only three years into his sentence when Santee Dakota organizer John Trudell, his contemporary in AIM, delivered a searing 1980 speech at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering. As Zoltan Grossman has documented, “Multinational mining companies, such as Union Carbide and Exxon, proposed the development of the Black Hills for energy resources, including coal mines, uranium mines, and coal slurry pipelines.” The Black Hills gathering brought together a global convergence of more than 10,000 Indigenous activists and non-Native allies to hold the line against a repeat of the 1950s, which, per Grossman, had “result[ed] in the extensive irradiation of the southern Black Hills community of Edgemont.”
A Navy radio operator during the Vietnam War, Trudell was all of 23 when he first came to national visibility as the voice of Radio Free Alcatraz, which aired on the Pacifica Network, during the 1969-71 takeover of the Island. Trudell had also witnessed close-up and personally the massive, militarized violence that the federal government unleashed on Wounded Knee to open up Lakota land for extraction. And by 1980, Trudell had good reason to suspect that his pregnant wife Shoshone Paiute activist Tina Manning, their three children, and Manning’s mother Leah Hicks-Manning had been among its most recent casualties. In 1979, all five died in a house fire that broke out within 12 hours of Trudell burning a U.S. flag outside FBI headquarters. Not surprisingly, following a brief and perfunctory investigation by none other than the FBI itself, the fire was ruled accidental. For Trudell, and so many other AIM members and supporters, U.S. resource wars– whether in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, or South Dakota– were extensions of the so-called “Indian Wars.”
To Trudell, nuclear war wasn’t confined to some future exchange between the U.S. and Russia or China. It was unfolding in the present, and not just against Indigenous people, but against everyone who stood to be impacted by mining, radiation, and a nuclear industry that placed profit overall life:
Are they not waging nuclear war on us now when the miners die from cancer from mining that uranium? Are they not waging nuclear war with Three Mile Island when they release that stuff into the air? Are they not waging nuclear war when they build all of these nuclear reactors….? Are they not waging nuclear war when they attack the Indian people on their land militarily… so that they can get at the natural resources to feed their radioactive machine? That is war and they are waging it against us….
To Trudell, “nuclearization” was a “final assault,” a form of madness that needed to be resisted at every turn. The U.S. government and assorted nuke boosters and interests would try to sell us on “the illusion” of safe nuclear power, and of our own “powerlessness” to resist the industry. For Trudell, our very survival depended on recognizing both our dependency on “our Sacred Mother, Earth,” and the power we draw from her–and from each other. “We are Power,” Trudell repeats throughout his speech.
In the wake of the hair-raising standoff between the Ukraine and Russia, when the latter seized the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of what remains the world’s largest nuclear disaster; and with Japan now releasing nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean; and some 40% of the world’s nuclear plants routinely buffeted by extreme weather events and rising sea levels; with heightened nuclear saber rattling in the Middle East, Trudell’s Thanksgiving speech is more relevant than ever.
If you want to get a sense of the kind of propaganda that a revitalized and ostensibly “green” nuclear industry is trying to sell us on today, check out Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance. With corporations bent on selling us the fiction of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, and sustainable answer to the climate crisis– one that will enable the U.S. to continue down the path of limitless extraction, consumption, and war– we’d do well to heed his words: “We cannot protect ourselves if we do not protect the Earth.” Amen to that.
Desiree Hellegers is affiliated faculty with the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver; director of The Thin Green Line is People History Project and a member/producer with the Old Mole Variety Hour on Portland’s KBOO Radio. Their web series “How I Learned to Breathe Thru the Apocalypse” is airing on Portland’s Open Signal Cable TV . More information on their work can be found at https://labs.wsu.edu/desiree-hellegers/
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