SOPHIA WILANSKI was on the Frontlines last night at BlackWater Bridge, she was shot by the Riot Police with a concussion grenade. she is in a hospital in Minneapolis and her arm was amputated today. Morton County Sheriffs Dept and the National Guard who are working to protect a pipeline, a PIPELINE is responsible for this grievous bodily harm and must be held accountable! there are no words for what has happened.
I sort of know the person running the gofundme, enough for me to feel comfortable chipping in. Please do the same.
https://www.gofundme.com/30aezxs
Sophia Wilansky is a water protector from New York. She left New York City several weeks ago to help with the struggle at Standing Rock. She been an active participate and family to the activist groups NYC Shut It Down and Hoods4Justice. Sophia has always been committed to confronting injustice through vigilance and resistance.
Sophia was giving out bottles of water to protectors holding down the space when she was shot with a concussion grenade. This was the response of police and DAPL mercenaries as she and other brave protectors attempted to hold the line against the black snake in service of protecting our water. As of last night, we found out she was air lifted to County Medical Center in Minneapolis were she’s currently undergoing extensive, hours-long surgery from injuries sustained from the blast.
Please consider donating to help pay for her treatment. We must to support our comrades when they need us the most. She needs all of us right now. After all she is our family. #StandWithStandingRock #WaterIsLife
I give what I can.
The news has a perpetual blindspot for unceded indigenous territories in Canada, ie inhabited land that never signed anything and were even lucky enough not to be thrown under the bus by neighbors signing a treaty that included their territory. Once colonial expansion reached the mountains of BC the federal government got lazy, stopped even pretending to "legally" annex land and treated their takeover as a fait accompli. It gives white people a brain aneurysm to consider that their Great Unified Country is actually full of contested territories still actively resisting occupation.
So no one's been talking much about the contemporary pipeline opposition in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory along the Morice River in central BC. The Unist'ot'en people won a supreme court case in 97 recognizing that Canada had no treaty claim over their territory, not that it has helped them much. The camp has been successfully resisting for 7 years, and now are anticipating another push against them. The Trudeau election caused a bunch of white "allies" to assume everything's going to be ok forever now and go home.
I'm worried about the friends I have going up there since the RCMP get especially vicious with the domestic terrorism schtick out in the wilderness where no one's going to pay the money to send a news crew, it's a literal military invasion of sovereign territory and white people are gonna say they deserve it for exerting their right to self determination. It's always amazing just how fast settler people's talk about the sacred inviolability property rights go flying out the window the moment indigenous people try to exert them.
Edited by shriekingviolet ()
getfiscal posted:this is probably one of the goals of the promotion of the "aboriginal industry".
oh my god, alberta's Listener Supported Radio station CKUA (a big deal for boomer hippy left-centre types even outside the province) is supposedly "ad free" but runs a constant stream of ad fluff for suncor, enbridge, chevron etc about their "aboriginal industry" work programs because solidarity am i rite u guys???
anyway there is an ideological infrastructure around all that which scares me too, like, there are a bunch of economic research positions and institutes that have been founded in the past few years aimed entirely at framing the debate in narrow "partnership" and national economic development terms. this is mixed up with real moral angst about poverty on reservations and such to create a bad situation. like paul martin basically does that full-time now, just talk about how we can spread the benefits of our economy to aboriginal communities when what he really means is create certainty in property rights such that they can't be overturned by democratic action.
(in hindsight i really fucked up by not finding her at some point and thanking her/telling her about j. sakai)
swirlsofhistory posted:...and that's why you don't protest pipelines!
Rhizzone Awards 2016: Most likely to have a psychiatric meltdown
getfiscal posted:i mean that there is so much money at stake that the government will create these little projects and the company will include set-asides and investment opportunities specifically designed to create class hierarchies in indigenous communities. this is probably one of the goals of the promotion of the "aboriginal industry". like they will go in and offer a bunch of money to a certain slice of a community to create small businesses related to resource extraction and supporting it, and give money to the political/community leaders involved in various ways, just to split the community and diminish resistance by involving "stakeholders". but they are rigorously careful never to suggest they need their actual collective support to move forward. but it is more insidious to debate against because it is carefully framed in terms of national economic development and helping people.
this just sounds like a modernized version of the old tactic where colonial authorities (i think in central/south america? i cant remember the name of the thing im thinking of so its really hard to search for) where settlers would basically prop up certain people so that they owed their power in their local communities to them and those people would manage those communities in such a way as not to undermine their source of authority
c_man posted:getfiscal posted:
i mean that there is so much money at stake that the government will create these little projects and the company will include set-asides and investment opportunities specifically designed to create class hierarchies in indigenous communities. this is probably one of the goals of the promotion of the "aboriginal industry". like they will go in and offer a bunch of money to a certain slice of a community to create small businesses related to resource extraction and supporting it, and give money to the political/community leaders involved in various ways, just to split the community and diminish resistance by involving "stakeholders". but they are rigorously careful never to suggest they need their actual collective support to move forward. but it is more insidious to debate against because it is carefully framed in terms of national economic development and helping people.
this just sounds like a modernized version of the old tactic where colonial authorities (i think in central/south america? i cant remember the name of the thing im thinking of so its really hard to search for) where settlers would basically prop up certain people so that they owed their power in their local communities to them and those people would manage those communities in such a way as not to undermine their source of authority
That was a classic British strategy. Little Klanada grew up to be just like daddy.
Army Corps of Engineers Halts Dakota Access Pipeline
hey posted:Army Corps of Engineers Halts Dakota Access Pipeline
Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren, who remained publicly silent on the pipeline for months as protests forced a halt in the pipeline's construction, told NBC News in an interview in November that he was "100 percent sure that the pipeline will be approved by a Trump administration," regardless of what the Army Corps ultimately decides.