Greetings, trouble-makers.
Welcome to Trouble….
my name is not important.
In the year of 1990 my community, the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke,
began to fight the construction of a golf course that would have destroyed
one of our sacred burial grounds.
We filed petitions, we protested, and finally we took up arms against the Quebec police
and eventually the Canadian army, to protect our land.
After a 78 day stand off... we fuckin won!
And the cemetery and the surrounding pines, that would have been cleared and used by rich
men to play golf on, are still there today.
Fast forward to 26 years later.
The Lakota community of Standing Rock, faced off with oil infrastructure company,
Energy Transfer Partners against their attempt to build the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL,
through their territory, and under the Missouri River.
A pipeline that they say, if built, will almost certainly rupture and contaminate
the water of millions of people in the United States.
The fight against DAPL became the stuff of legend.
Thousands of Indigenous and Settler allies converged in North Dakota to stop this project
against incredible odds.
They became known as water protectors, and in November of 2016 they had a temporary
victory, when outgoing president Barack Obama denied a permit for a key part of the construction.
For some, this executive action seemed to validate a particular strategy
and corresponding set of tactics.
But history has clearly shown that states have never had any qualms breaking the countless
promises they’ve made to Indigenous peoples.
As for those who’d forgotten, or neglected this fact...
Donald Trump wasted no time in reminding them.
At the same time,
there were many water protectors who saw this political maneuver
as the dirty trick it was, and who continued to stress
the need for a strategy based on physical confrontation and direct action.
During the next thirty minutes, we’ll bring you the voices of some of these individuals,
as they relate their experiences fighting the black snake...
and making a whole lotta trouble.
It's hard to just even use the English word "warrior" when you're talking about
what it means to be a warrior.
Because as Indigenous people, we we born into this life and we believe that it's our duty
and responsibility to defend our land, in which our language, our culture,
our existence flows from.
There is no separating us from our land.
It's a spiritual connection that goes deep since the beginning of our people.
So as a warrior we are a defender.
We are a protector.
And as a warrior we would do and by any means protect and defend our people.
Anything that comes in the way of that
-- and here we're talking about the contamination of water that so much people depend on.
I've been down here since the middle of September.
And here to be in solidarity with people that are fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Across the river is Sacred Stone camp where it originally started.
There was like a handful of people there for a long time.
Once these guys actually came here and really started building and destroying the earth,
so everyone just started coming here faster.
And every day it was just growing and growing.
Before you knew it, Sacred Stone camp was just overflowing.
I came out here in response to a call for medical support.
We received an invite from some of the matriarchs and Indigenous leadership from this Lakota/
Dakota/Nakota territory to come and help fight the black snake, help fight the pipeline.
And in some matriarchs' opinions, "by any means necessary".
And in a spirit of collective resistance, and use a diversity of tactics to do that.
There's hundreds of camps in this bigger Standing Rock encampment that's called
Oceti Sakowin camp.
It got up to around twenty thousand people.
But a lot of the people that are here and have maintained camps here.
There's High Star camp, there is Wild Oglala camp.
So this is a big massive mobilization. There’s a lot of people here
and they want to stop a pipeline.
It went from just a few of us in little small groups, going out and shutting down the pipeline
wherever we could, y'know?
Like multiple sites a day... everything.
We were just on it.
Black Snake Killaz! Black Snake Killaz!
Alright, now from here.
On three, we're gonna move.
One, two, three!
Move! Move! Move!
Diversity of tactics is a turn of phrase that represents the very real fact that for every
one person on the frontline who's there and who can stand and catch rubber bullets,
there are many folks behind them.
Be those folks medics, be those folks logistics personnel, be those the folks in the kitchen
who fed them that day.
I believe that the only way that anyone could organize is as a diversity of tactics
because we are all so diverse people.
Where else could you get thousands of people to all come together like that and form this
community and actually people are not, y'know... like killing each other?
Look at the rest of society!
We need all the things.
We need people litigating in court, we need people doing "petitions", we need people praying,
and also people that are doing direct action.
A lot of people did a lot of different things.
They went to courthouse, went to the State Capitol, locking down on the machinery and
actually physically stopping the construction and the machines for the day.
They had massive caravans out to just make a presence and stop the construction.
Stopping it everywhere we could... anyway we could.
Using our bodies, locking down, just showing up in force and scaring the workers off.
Just the pure presence of four hundred water protectors and Native people
would shut DAPL down for the day.
And sometimes they would actually be running to their trucks.
Because they know what they're doing is wrong. Like... I would be scared too!
At one point, lockdowns were really effective.
They could stop construction, they could stop what was happening for the day on
prospective work sites.
But then it got to the point where it was so militarized.
And with the resources that we were up against, it didn't matter that we had the intention
to go and lock down to something.
It just wasn't an option.
So then people had to reevaluate the situation and ask themselves what it means to be effective,
look at the violence that is being perpetrated on them, and then collectively come back together
and decide what tactics they're going to use.
And then people started seeing things like flaming cars on highways, and what-have-you.
Because a lot of the time, that sacred fire was the only thing protecting people from
the crazy cops and military from coming in and wrecking shop.
The climax of everything that I witnessed when I was here,
was when the police took the front line camp.
People sacrificed vehicles that day, to blockade.
"What does that mean, to sacrifice vehicles?"
Lit up.
Were it not for people who had been training for these sorts of non-violent civil disobedience
confrontational situations... that pipe would've been built by now.
Success in stopping a pipeline or other major infrastructure project
depends on a number of factors.
And despite what lots of people wanna believe... facebook likes aren't one of them.
A strong heart, patience, and determination on the part of land defenders are all crucial.
But timing and proper planning are also key.
It's important to get out in front of the pipeline, both physically and by knowing
when and where to make your stand.
On the west coast of Turtle Island, in the unceded territories of the Wet'suwet'en nation
in so-called "British Columbia", warriors and tribal elders from the Unis'tot'en clan
have been blocking the construction of multiple pipelines through their territories
for seven years now.
This anchor of land defense has been the Unis'tot'en Camp, a resistance community constructed
smack dab in the pipelines' proposed path -- similar in some ways to Oceti Sakowin,
also known as Sacred Stone camp, that has served as the home base
for water protectors fighting to block the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Here’s camp spokesperson Freda Huson, kicking the cops out of her territory.
People don’t just freely walk in because were blocking pipelines out,
we’re not blocking everybody out.
I’m not a pipeline.
And here she is again kicking out pipeline workers who illegally
choppered in to do survey work.
Is there a problem why you’re not leaving?
And here she is denying access to Chevron executives, who had the audacity to
offer her corporate bottled water and industrial tobacco.
We’re here today to talk to you about doing work on your land and are requesting access
onto your territory.
We’ve already said no to these projects and that no pipelines would come on our territory.
In November of 2016, Canada's walking photo-op of a Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau,
signed an order killing the Northern Gateway pipeline,
one of the pipelines that had been slated to cross paths with the Unis'tot'en.
But at the same news conference where he signed Northern Gateway's death certificate,
Trudeau announced the approval of two other pipelines including Enbridge's Line 3
and Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain
-- which is expected to face serious resistance in the months and years to come.
In addition to logistical considerations, those seeking to block pipelines need to be
prepared to deal with internal dynamics, and for the potential for disagreements over tactics
to sow further discord and disunity.
Here you have hundreds of different people and hundreds of different tribes
that are coming together.
People that have many different views on how we're gonna fight this pipeline.
People believe that the only way we're going to fight this pipeline is if we face off
and when we fight direct head-on.
Some people think the best way is the legal route.
Some people feel that prayer is the most powerful thing
and that's the only way that we're going to beat this.
But as Indigenous people, we have to understand that we come from respect.
Y'know... that's who we are as Indigenous people.
Respecting the way that people believe.
There has been a group ever since we got here, y'know, that wanted some of us out of here.
But we're still here.
We didn't want to go and we weren't gonna go nowhere cause we knew
nothing was gonna happen if we left.
There was a lot of fighting that went on too because they didn't want our camp
doing actions no more.
They didn't understand direct action so they just didn't want it, you know?
The whole tribe and all the council and everybody.
There has been a lot of issues with "peace police" and how people
have been fighting this struggle.
Even when it's been just lockdowns.
The peace police both here in treaty territory, much as I've seen them over the years
in urban settings and demonstrations, are folks who tend to, for one reason or another,
feel that their concern for other people's safety trumps any good tactics, or any of those
individuals who may be putting themselves knowingly in harm's way.
Trumps their opinions that they have made to choose to be in harm's way.
Who are the Peace Police?
It's a combination of people that are closely affiliated with the tribe,
people that have, like, monetary interest in different NGOs.
So even some people that came here that threw down in Ferguson and Baltimore,
that were part of those struggles, have come here and have felt relatively immobilized.
Because they've tried to be good comrades in deferring to Indigenous leadership.
But there's such a struggle between different groups as to, like, who is Indigenous leadership
and what it means to be here in a good way.
And what it means to resist in a way that's beneficial to the local community.
There was this group of people that came in and they were just all about "peace! peace!"
And they were bringing around spiritual items and trying to use them against the people
and it caused a lot of confusion and fear and, I don't know, anger.
Don't touch me!
Back up!
Some of our own people that were policing our own people, telling our own warriors
and water protectors that were taking direct action to go back.
Go back to camp.
"Keep it peaceful!"
"Come on you guys...that's not okay" "We need to be peaceful!"
You can't both ask people to come and fight and use civil disobedience and nonviolent
direct action tactics and similarly lose your spine for those tactics when people
start getting injured or the police start responding with the sorts of violence
that we train folks to expect.
When we instead tell folks that this will be accomplished through the courts,
or this will be accomplished through prayer...
why were so many people asked to come to be physically present?
These peace police have time and time again scuddled and interfered with actions that
were well under the momentum to be successful.
And they were hampered.
“love will find a way!”
If there's one good thing you can say about nazis, it's you know that they are your enemy.
No doubt about it.
You see one of those racist idiots walking down the street, or giving an interview with
a reporter, you just wanna punch 'em in the head.
Ouch!
But within movements of liberation, there are actors within our ranks
that claim to be our allies, but who are really not.
Putting aside police infiltrators and informants, who pose a real threat,
we'd like to talk to you about Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGO's.
NGO's have a sordid history of infiltrating, pacifying and co-opting movements.
Now... not all NGO's engage in these practices, and some actually do good work,
but in recent memory we've seen far too many examples of Environmental NGO's
royally screwing over Indigenous folks engaged in land defense.
Take the battle for the Great Bear Rainforest in Western Canada, where Greenpeace and ForestEthics
joined the Indigenous grassroots forest protectors, later to sideline them and negotiate with
logging companies to save a fraction of the one of the most important temperate rainforests
left in the world.
What the logging companies got in return, was a promise that the Environmental NGO's
would not protest or oppose logging in Western Canada.
This deal became a template for an even bigger betrayal.
At stake this time was the Canadian Boreal Forest,
one of the largest continuous forests in the world.
This time Greenpeace and ForestEthics teamed up with the Canadian Forests Products Association,
i.e. the logging industry, for a similar deal.
Once again, Indigenous communities who have land in the Boreal Forest were not consulted
and NGO's promised not only to stop anti-logging campaigns in the Boreal Forest,
but also to defend the industry.
One interesting piece of the agreement is, uhhh....
with Greenpeace, David Suzuki, ForestEthics, Canadian Parks and Wilderness on our side,
when someone else comes and tries to bully us,
the agreement actually requires that they come and work with us in repelling the attack.
And we’ll be able to say... fight me, fight my gang.
The latest deal of this type was signed between NGO's like ForestEthics,
and Alberta's Tar Sands industry.
Given the public backlash of the previous two agreements, this one was done
behind closed doors, so we don't know all the details.
What we do know is that oil companies agreed to place limits in Tar Sands extraction,
in exchange for the enviros backing down on their opposition to pipeline construction.
We now turn our attention to another movement enemy hidden in plain sight.
That is the federally-funded tribal governments that rule over and police Indigenous communities.
In the US, these so called "sovereign tribes" govern federal government-assigned pieces
of land called reservations, or reserves in the case of Canada.
Their leaders are members of the community, and are chosen through elections,
and have little or nothing to do with traditional governing structures
of the Indigenous communities they oversee.
Historically, although there are some exceptions, tribal government officials are more likely
to cut deals with mining, logging and other extractive industries to exploit traditional
territories of the Indigenous nations they belong to.
This is land outside the reservation and land in which they have no jurisdiction.
Both in the US and Canada, Tribal Councils have their own police forces.
Let's not forget that Indian Police killed Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Reservation.
And in my community of Kanehsatà:ke, Mohawk police shot and severely crippled
Oka Crisis veteran Joe David.
He later passed away from those injuries.
Today we see the same thing happening in Standing Rock.
Just this month Bureau of Indian Affairs cops brutally beat a water protector
fighting to stop DAPL, in their campaign to clear out
the last remaining people out of the protest camps.
I believe, and it is my belief, that any type of DIA, or Department of Indian Affairs,
or Bureau of Indian Affairs, you know Tribal Government or elected Chief and Council
that receives federal funding from the federal government that pays their bills,
that gives them the paycheck, has [no] right within a people's movement.
Because we've seen it time and time again, them be co-opted.
And it's not the true voice of the people.
And we're dealing with this back home with our fight against the Kinder Morgan pipeline
and I see us as Indigenous people battling with this straight across the whole hemisphere,
where there are Native people that side with the corporate interests.
And it really does damage to our people and to our movements.
And a lot of times our people fear exposing the corruption within tribal government,
or even take this tribal government as their own government
-- when that was invented by the American and Canadian state
to continue to control the people.
As discussions about the Dakota Access Pipeline continue, Standing Rock tribal council
will take all the support they can get, provided they abide by
the rules of peaceful protest.
Folks who overly fetishize Native peoples and populations on Turtle Island but don't
have a real understanding of the reservation system, or that these reservations used to
be prisoner of war camps, they think that Tribal Council is part and parcel with the
traditional leadership, which is only played into when you see tribal council members wearing
full war bonnets when they've not done anything that the traditional mandate
to get such a sacred item would dictate.
And so you have this real kind of constant simmering conflict between these more traditional
Native folks and these IRA governments who you even see in much of the mainstream media
who talk about Chairman Dave Archambault, and don't talk about the International Youth Council
or the Youth Runners, or Ladonna Bravebull-Allard,
who it was their spark that started the first sacred fire over at Sacred Stone.
There has been a lot of self-proclaimed Elders that are men that are not all from this community,
or are not deferring to the matriarchs in this community that are supposed to have power.
And that has created conflict and divide when we don't need it.
Which is exactly what the gov wants and what COINTELPRO and shit like that does.
As a friend kinda put it as the question of the year around here.... is "which Elder?"
Because you always have these instances of people coming and saying they're speaking
on the authority of "the Elders."
Or "a Elder."
But often time they don't know the name of that Elder.
And so you can't help but wonder how good of a way they are operating in
if they're coming in and barking orders but they don't really know
where those orders originated from.
"The chiefs told us to go around asking people if we could-" "There is no chief here!
There are no chiefs!"
"No, nobody's listening right now!
The Elders asked you guys to go back to camp!"
"See... fuckin people are always doing that shit.
Trying to split everybody up."
You see it clearly.
The players that come in to be able to co-opt.
And we have to be able to pinpoint that and to be able to address it
in a way that's going to expose it, but also eliminate it from happening again.
"And what we need to do is we have to be proud of what we did.
We have to be honored by the victory and it's time now.
It's time to go home."
There is a lot of different ideas and lot of discussion around why Dave Archambault
asked people to go home.
One of the things is someone said that the tribe could be held liable
if he didn't publicly say this.
But this land is what they call "1851 Treaty Land."
This land that the government calls "Army Corps Lands" is out of the jurisdiction
of the Reservation so it's supposedly out of the jurisdiction of
Dave Archambault and the Tribal Chairman.
This one pipeline where people refuse to leave.
This is not gonna be detrimental to our Nation.
He's a politician.
That's what it is.
Like, is that who people defer to in the community here
as like the end-all be-all? No.
People defer to the matriarchs from the community, or their Elders from their tribes
that they're representing that have been, like, invited to be here.
Does that make people leave? Obviously not.
So obviously the people that are left here, think it's bullshit, or they would have left.
Despite all our best efforts... sometimes pipelines still get built.
The US alone contains over 2.5 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines.
That's enough pipe to encircle the earth more than 100 times.
Thankfully, there are a number of ways to stop the flows of existing pipelines
for those who know what they're doing.
Last year, Enbridge's Line 9 pipeline was shut down three times by trouble-makers
who broke into Enbridge's stations and shut down manual valves.
This happened once in so-called Quebec, and twice in so-called Ontario.
Activists used a similar tactic to simultaneously shut down five Tar Sands pipelines
coming into the US, in a coordinated action
carried out in solidarity with water defenders in Standing Rock.
Since they cover huge tracts of land, pipelines are extremely vulnerable to sabotage.
Between 2008 and 2009, Encana pipelines in and around the towns of Dawson Creek
and Tomslake, in so-called BC, were targeted by a series of bombings.
Earlier this year, someone used heavy machinery to dig up a section of pipe in so-called Alberta,
causing about half a million dollars in damage.
Oil infrastructure has also been a choice target for armed rebel groups,
such as the ELN, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta,
or MEND, in Nigeria.
Of course, when taking action against existing pipeline infrastructure, it's incredibly important
that people know what they're doing, and are fully aware of all the risks involved.
States go to extreme lengths to criminalize people they catch messing with the flows of
crude and natural gas, and will try to deter activists with the threat of
extremely long prison sentences.
And it should be obvious, but it's worth stressing that the whole point of shutting oil pipelines
is to avoid environmental damage.
So it's vitally important that anyone carrying out these types of actions take all the necessary
precautions to ensure that they don't accidentally end up causing a leak or spills themselves.
That said...we're in for a long fight with high stakes.
What looks like a defeat can also be a chance to regroup, reflect on how things went down,
and figure out how to adapt our strategies and tactics as necessary.
What I learned from here is that, going home and working with our community and Nation,
we really have to set out some type of template or way to organize that's going to respect
the whole range of diversity of tactics.
And I believe that it's going to take education
and y'know... it's going to have to take leading by example,
because we can't have history repeat itself.
There is just regrouping that needs to happen.
Recollectivizing. And the biggest part, that comes back to what we've been talking about
is trying to get either the peace police out of here
or have them be accountable for their actions, so that they can see that what they're doing
is really negative to the struggle as a whole.
And it's negative to community building, and that they are not protecting the community.
They're endangering the community.
They think they're protecting the community from the cops and the military "coming in."
But the fact is, they're already here.
They're gonna build this thing.
It'll eventually break, rupture, what have-you, and then it will hurt
and destroy the community more.
So, like, regardless of what inter-conflicts that may or may not be happening in camp,
or that the people on the "other team" the cops and the police are creating,
- - if we can remember that what they're doing is gonna cause more harm than anything,
it can help us make better decisions as a radical resistance.
And it can also help us understand like, what kind of help to ask for.
And if we don't need help, where to send other people so that they can be more effective
so that more of these encampments can keep popping up in other places in the United Snakes,
cause that's the idea.
Like this happened here, why can't it happen somewhere else?
The skillsets that were brought in by folks who had been training to fight pipelines
was crucial.
In many of these coming fights, we're gonna see communities who are standing up
as they get fed up with how the oil companies and gas companies,
and mining companies treat them.
But they don't have the skillsets with them to necessarily bring
a solid resistance to those things.
While these legal machinations are going on, while the public comments are going on,
we can't continue to have faith that the process will work 'cause the process is rigged.
We must go in tandem.
And we can hope and we can pray that the easier paper route will get a project stopped.
But we also need to prepare ourselves and prepare our youth in the tactics that they'll
need to successfully fight these pipelines rather then when all the paper fight is done,
all the public comment is done and the thing gets approved.
That's not the time to start bringing people in to get trained.
That's the time when you gotta start your attack.
We have to completely look at ourselves as as our whole life is dedicated to the movement.
To spark this whole revolution so we can fight for our freedom, so we can fight and have
what we're fighting for: our land, our water, our territory.
So we can live where we want, hunt where we want, swim where we want,
like our ancestors before white man came.
That's why we're here.
On January 24th, Donald Trump signed an executive presidential order approving the remaining
construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
With the same stroke of the pen, he also gave the go-ahead to the Keystone XL pipeline,
which had been shelved by the Obama administration in 2015 following a multi-year fight
by anti-pipeline activists and environmental groups.
On Thursday February 22nd, an army of state and county police, flanked by members of the
National Guard and Department of Homeland Security, cleared out the last remaining pockets
of resistance at the Oceti Sakowin camp, bringing a bitter end to the NoDAPL encampment.
As we enter into a new phase of struggle against ramped up fossil fuel production,
and even more unrestrained militarization of policing,
the dynamics that played out at Sacred Stone camp can provide valuable lessons moving forward.
These are lessons that our movements must learn and properly internalize
in order to better prepare us for the battles yet to come.
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this first episode of Trouble.
Stay tuned for more to come.
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Now... get out there and make some trouble!