[m2c] Rape of the Land by Andrea Smith (Part 1)

[usman x]

Chpater 3 from "Conuest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide"
by Andrea Smith. 2005. pgs 55-78

Rape of the Land

Discussed in Chapter 1, Native peoples have become marked as
inherently violable through a process of sexual colonization. By
extension, their lands and territories have become marked as violable
as well. The connection between the coloniza tion of Native people's
bodies — particularly Native women's bodies — and Native lands is not
simply metaphorical. Many feminist theorists have argued that there
is a connection between patriarchy's disregard for nature, women, and
indigenous peoples. The colonial/patriarchal mind that seeks to
control the sexuality of women and indigenous peoples also seeks to
control nature. Jane Caputi states:

           Violence against women remains protected by custom,
           indifference, glamorization, and denial. Concomitantly, the
           culture, language, traditions, myths, social organizations,
           and members of gynocentric cultures, such as those of North
           American Indians, have been slashed and trashed. Moreover,
           as I will demonstrate, the basic myths, motivations, and
           methods behind genocide — the wasting of the organic and
           elemental worlds and the attempted annihilation of the
           planet — are rooted in gynocidal and misogynist paradigms.
           1

A common complaint among colonizers was that indigenous peoples did
not properly subdue the natural environment. This reasoning became the
colonizer's legal basis for appropriating land from Native peoples.
For instance, Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay colony
declared that "America fell under the legal rubric of *vacuum
domicilium* because the Indians had not 'subdued' it and therefore had
only a 'natural' and not a 'civil' right to it."2 George E. Ellis said
that the Indians "simply wasted everything within their reach....They
required enormous spaces of wilderness for their mode of existence."3
Walter Prescott Webb reasoned that free land was "land free to be
taken."4 This notion that Native peoples did not properly use land and
hence had no title to it forms the basis of the "doctrine of
discovery" which is the foundation of much U.S. case law relating to
Indian land claims.

This principle as articulated in /Johnson and Graham's Lessee v.
William McIntosh/ (1823) held that the U.S. federal government holds
"exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either
by purchase or conquest" by right of discovery. According to the
Supreme Court, "The title by conquest is acquired and maintained by
force. The conqueror prescribes its limits."5 The justification for
conquest was that "the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were
fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was
drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their
country, was to leave the country a wilderness."6

The courts did not rule that Native peoples had no claim to land at
all; rather, they had no right to transfer land to another party. "It
has never been contended, that Indian title amounted to
nothing...Indian inhabitants are to be considered merely as occupants,
to be protected, indeed while in peace, in the possession of their
lands, but to be deemed incapable of transferring the absolute title
to others."7

And certainly, even today, colonizers justify the theft of Native
lands on the grounds that Native peoples did not or do not properly
control or subdue nature. For instance, among the Christian Right,
John Eidsmoe contends that Christians never stole Indian land. He
argues that since Native people did not privatize land, and since
these communities had not been "established by God," Europeans had a
right to seize the land from them.8 And furthermore, while
Christianity may have been forced on Native people, "millions of
people are in heaven today as a result."9 And as Pat Robertson writes,

"These tribes are...in an arrested state of social development. They
are not less valuable as human beings because of that, but they offer
scant wisdom or learning or philosophical vision that can be
instructive to a society that can feed the entire population of the
earth in a single harvest and send spacecraft to the moon... .Except
for our crimes, our wars and our frantic pace of life, what we have is
superior to the ways of primitive peoples...Which life do you think
people would prefer: freedom in an enlightened Christian civilization
or the suffering of subsistence living and superstition in a jungle?
You choose."10

CONTROLLING NATURE?

Unfortunately for the colonizers, nature is not so easy to subdue and
control. As we find ourselves in the midst of environmental disaster,
it is clear that no one can escape the repercussions of environmental
damage. Yet colonizers attempt to deny this reality by forcing those
people who have already been rendered dirty, impure, and hence
expendable to face the most immediate consequences of environmental
destruction.

Marginalized communities suffer the primary brunt of environmental
destruction so that other communities can remain in denial about the
effects of environmental degradation. The United Church of Christ's
landmark study on environmental racism, *Toxic Wastes and Race,* found
that race is consistently the most statistically significant variable
in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities. Three out of
every five African Americans and Latino North Americans live in
communities with toxic waste sites. Half of all Asians, Pacific
Islanders, and American Indians live in communities with uncontrolled
toxic waste sites.11 People of color are also disproportionately
affected by workplace hazards. For instance, pesticide exposure among
primarily Latino farmworkers causes more than 300,000
pesticide-related illnesses each year.12

American Indian lands are a particular focal point in the struggle for
environmental justice. It is not an accident that virtually all
uranium production takes place on or near Indian land.13 Nor is it a
coincidence that to date, more than 50 reservations have been targeted
for waste dumps.14 Military and nuclear testing also takes place almost
exclusively on Native lands. For instance, there have been at least
928 nuclear explosions on Western Shoshone land at the Nevada test
site. Fifty percent of these underground tests have leaked radiation
into the atmosphere.15 Native peoples, the expendable ones, are
situated to suffer the brunt of environmental destruction so that
colonizers can continue to be in denial about the fact that they will
also eventually be affected.

As a case in point, Native Americans for Clean Environment (NACE) was
one of the organizers of the campaign to stop the Kerr-McGee Sequoyah
Fuel Facility (a uranium conversion facility) in Oklahoma. In its
campaign, NACE discovered that Kerr-McGee was using radioactive wastes
to make fertilizer. Kerr-McGee was eventually closed down, although it
has not cleaned up its nuclear waste at this plant. The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission also allowed Kerr-McGee to use this fertilizer
on 15,000 acres of hay fields in Oklahoma, where cattle are grazed
before being sold on the open market. The only health study conducted
on the cattle revealed that 10 percent of the cattle had resulting
cancerous growths. A frog with nine legs was discovered in a nearby
pond.16 These effects were deemed "normal" by Kerr-McGee. Clearly,
non-Native peoples are affected by radiation poisoning.17

Another example of environmental racism is the plan to relocate all
U.S. nuclear wastes into a permanent high-level nuclear waste
repository in Yucca Mountain, which is on Shoshone land and located on
an active volcanic zone, increasing the risk of radioactive leakage.18
To encourage the opening of these facilities, George W. Bush pushed
for this plan to fuel the "war on terror," and in 2002, Congress
approved the repository at an estimated cost of $3.25 billion. Waste
storage is scheduled to begin by 2010. While Indians are once again on
the frontlines, the Shoshone are not the only people affected by the
creation of this repository; it will also impact the people who reside
near freeways where the waste will be transported. (The repository on
Yucca Mountain will receive nuclear wastes from throughout the U.S. —
only five states would not be affected by the transportation of
high-level radioactive wastes.)

Furthermore, the effects of environmental contamination are global.
"Depleted" uranium is the byproduct that results when enriched uranium
is separated from natural uranium in order to produce fuel for nuclear
reactors. Chemically toxic, depleted uranium is used by the nuclear
industry to produce deadly weapons that have been used on peoples
around the world. It is an extremely dense, hard metal and can cause
chemical poisoning to the body in the same way as lead or any other
heavy metal. Depleted uranium is also radioactive, and it
spontaneously burns on impact, creating tiny glass particles which are
small enough to be inhaled. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, it
poses a long-term threat to human health and the environment. 19

Depleted uranium was used against the peoples of Bosnia, Afghanistan,
and Iraq. During the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. blasted Iraqis
retreating from Kuwait with depleted uranium. The area where it was
used is now known as the "Highway of Death." People who live in the
area continue to suffer increased birth defect and cancer rates.
Depleted uranium has also been linked to the "Gulf War Syndrome"
suffered by U.S. soldiers.20

SOVEREIGNTY AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS

Because the environmental issues that impact Native peoples eventually
impact everyone, it would seem logical that mainstream environmental
organizations would naturally find themselves allied with Native
peoples. But while there have certainly been important alliances,
environmentalists have actively opposed Native treaty rights in many
cases. For instance, environmental groups, like the Sierra Club,
Audubon and Earth Action, formed the Alaska Coalition in 1970 to
protect Alaska's national parks and refuges. In the 1980s, it
organized primarily to stop the drilling for oil in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, home to the Gwich'in people in northeast
Alaska. The drilling in the proposed 1991 Johnson-Wallup bill would
have destroyed 40 percent of the caribou that the Gwich'in depended on
for subsistence. As part of their strategy to prevent drilling in the
refuge, the Alaska Coalition backed a compromise bill that would
provide incentives for oil drilling in the lower 48 states. Since a
large percentage of oil reserves in the lower 48 are on Indian land,
this legislation would have continued to jeopardize Native people.

When activists confronted Sierra Club president Michael Fischer on
this position at the People of Color Environmental Summit in October
1991, he denied that the Sierra Club supported the bill, even though
his support for the bill had been widely reported. Then later, he
contradicted this denial in his correspondence with Chicago Women of
All Red Nations (WARN). The rationale for this support was that "we
had to take a little of the bad with...all of the good" and "on
sovereign Indian lands only Indians themselves have the authority and
responsibility to make the decision [to drill for oil]."21

Unfortunately, indigenous peoples do not have full authority to decide
because, under U.S. law, as decided in Lonewolf v. Hitchcock (1903),
it is the U.S. Congress that has full "plenary power" to decide the
fate of indigenous peoples and lands. In fact, from the perspective of
the U.S. government, the term "reservation" indicates that the U.S.
owns title to these lands but "reserves" them for use by Indian
peoples. There is no reason to believe that decisions made about oil
drilling will ever be solely in the hands of Native peoples.
Fortunately, neither bill passed, although the threats against the
Arctic National Wildlife Refugee continue today.

Tension between Native peoples and mainstream environmentalists was
also generated by the spearfishing struggle in northern Wisconsin in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.22 In 1989, the federal courts
recognized the right of the Chippewa to spearfish in ceded territory.
As a result, a number of anti-Indian hate groups such as Stop Treaty
Abuse (STA) and Protect America's Rights and Resources (PARR), were
formed. When the Chippewa attempted to spearfish, these groups would
mobilize white people to flock to the boat landings and physically and
verbally harass the spearfishers and their allies. Some local
environmental and animal rights groups sided with the harassers, and
even disallowed a Native speaker from speaking on Earth Day in
Wisconsin. They agreed with the assertion made by the hate groups that
the Chippewa were "overfishing."

These activists failed to see the bigger picture. Around the same time
as the spearfishing fights, corporations had begun mining for natural
resources in northern Wisconsin. Their first efforts in the early
1980s had been derailed by a united Indian and non-Indian opposition.
Clearly, the courts' recognition of the Chippewa's right to hunt,
fish, and gather posed an additional threat to these companies and
should have bolstered the hopes of the environmentalists. If their
mining operations degraded the environment so the Chippewa could not
use it, then the tribe could argue that their operations violated
treaty rights.

By not defending treaty rights, these groups risked losing an
important legal weapon that could be used to prevent mining companies
from coming in and polluting the area. As Native activist Justine
Smith argues,

          Animal rights and environmental organizations played right
          into these divide-and-conquer techniques of mining
          companies. Through their narrow definition of animal rights,
          they did not pick up on the fact that the treaties retaining
          the Chippewa's right to hunt, fish, and gather in the ceded
          territory in Wisconsin was (and is) one of the best
          protections against potential widespread environmental
          degradation.... What happens to Native peoples and Native
          nations will eventually happen to everyone. *Defending and
          protecting Native rights and sovereignty is a first step
          toward preservation of the global community* (emphasis
          added) 23

Fortunately, as other scholars have documented, the Chippewa were able
to create coalitions with sport fishers by demonstrating that mining
companies were the real threat to Wisconsin. They then mobilized these
coalitions to pressure the governor of Wisconsin into supporting a
moratorium on mining.24

Similar politics erupted over the Makah whaling controversy in
Washington State beginning in the late 1990s. The Coalition for Human
Dignity documents how animal and environmental rights groups, such as
the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) and the Progressive
Animal Welfare Society, collaborated with far-right Republican
legislator Jack Metcalf to oppose the Makah. Metcalf has openly spoken
at the meetings of overtly racist and anti-Semitic organizations and
has called for the abrogation of Indian treaty rights. These groups,
instead of developing strategies to negotiate their differences with
the Makah that respected Native sovereignty, advocated for the U.S. to
abrogate its 1855 treaty with the Makah that guarantees their right to
whale hunt. What these "environmentalists" did not consider is that if
they had been successful in legitimizing the abrogation of one treaty,
it would have the effect of delegitimizing all treaties. They would be
destroying the efforts of Native peoples across the country who are
opposing corporate control through the use of treaties. Many of the
leaders of these organizations, such as Dave Forman, Farley Mowat, and
Paul Watson of SSCS, are also promoting an anti-immigration platform
in environmental groups such as the Sierra Club (as I will discuss
later in this chapter). Also collaborating with SSCS is Brigitte
Bardot, ally of the leading neofascist political party in France, the
National Front. She is also overtly anti-immigrant, particularly
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. In /Le Figaro,/ she stated: "Now my country,
France, my homeland, my land, is with the blessing of successive
government again invaded by a foreign, especially Muslim,
overpopulation to which we pay allegiance."25

-- 
"Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted 
with enslavement." Lee Maracle
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