On May 28, 2023, the body of Martín Morales Martínez was found floating in the Gama River in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Morales Martínez was Garifuna—a people descended from enslaved Africans, Arawak, and Carib Indians. He was also a respected land rights activist who devoted his life to fighting the theft of Garifuna coastal lands by corporations, investors, and state authorities. His was the most recent in a series of murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in the country that show how violence, economic development, and race are colliding there—and how little progress international efforts are making in building a more secure, equitable Latin America.

The Garifuna have a long history of insecurity and displacement in Honduras. Since the arrival of U.S.-owned fruit corporations in the 19th century, their communities have endured successive waves of resource extraction—from bananas to sumptuous beachside resorts—and have seen their rights, including collective property rights, increasingly eroded. In recent years, with the support of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), the Garifuna have turned to international courts to hold the country accountable. But despite significant judicial and electoral victories at a moment when the country’s human rights record should be improving, the violence against them has only worsened.

Murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in Honduras started during the 1990s, after the country adopted economic policies designed to fuel development in tourism, industrial agriculture, and mining. The lush, water- and mineral-rich Caribbean coastline, which is home to 46 Garifuna communities, garnered the attention of investors in beach resorts and African palm plantations, including some of Honduras’s most prominent families. Land defenders fought back by retaking stolen lands and advocating, with surprising efficacy, for the legal recognition of their rights to the territory they have historically occupied. They achieved many successes, but even gaining title to their lands did not ensure they held them securely.

Tensions inflamed dramatically after the June 2009 coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya, which thrust Honduras into a period of intensive, state-sanctioned resource plunder. Following his ouster, the government acted swiftly to overturn a moratorium on mining, passed legislation to hasten hydropower development, and in 2013 pushed through a law to incentivize foreign investment in the creation of semi-sovereign “start-up” cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country. Over the next decade, Honduras experienced widespread corruption at the highest levels of government and a rapid deterioration of human rights.

Amidst this political upheaval, two cases pertaining to Garifuna land rights disputes—one in Triunfo de la Cruz and the other in Punta Piedra—went to trial at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In both cases, Garifuna accused the government of violating property titles, failing to investigate and prosecute the political persecution of land defenders, and noncompliance with judicial decisions that established the communities’ prior claims over disputed lands.

In 2015, the court ruled in favor of the communities, affirming that the state had failed to protect Garifuna collective property rights. It called for several significant reparations, including returning illegally privatized land to the community and compensation for past harms. The communities were optimistic that justice would be served.

Yet the state has failed to comply with the court’s recommendations. Instead, the policies designed to foment investment and development remain largely intact. Violent attacks against land defenders have multiplied as well.

In 2019, at least 16 Garifuna people were murdered. In 2020, four community leaders from Triunfo de la Cruz were brutally abducted by men dressed in police uniform, leading many in the community to suspect direct state involvement. One of the disappeared men, Snider Centeno, was a member of OFRANEH and the acting president of the communal governing council. Meanwhile, the swelling violence and increasing death threats against activists further weakened the confidence of Garifuna in state institutions. Last year, two more land rights activists were killed in Triunfo de la Cruz—Morales Martínez and Ricardo Arnaúl Montero.

The election of left-wing president Xiomara Castro in 2021 was supposed to bring change. She ran on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy agenda that resonated among a large segment of the population—including many Black and Indigenous voters. But little has changed, underscoring the entrenched corruption within state institutions and the political and economic power of a handful of oligarchic families.

On August 29, 2023, the Inter-American Court again found Honduras responsible for the violation of Garifuna territorial rights in another significant victory. But like previous judgments, the court’s decision lacks an enforcement mechanism. Its implementation requires political will on the part of the Honduran government. That means it has not produced greater protections for Black and Indigenous Hondurans’ rights.

Due to their visible Blackness, the Garifuna people continue to be treated as non-native inhabitants without rightful claim to the lands they have resided on for hundreds of years. Change will not happen in Honduras until the state complies with the court rulings—and until the murders of Martín Morales Martínez and other Garifuna leaders are investigated and prosecuted.

The stakes are high, and global: Many Garifuna have fled to the U.S. searching for a stable future that is increasingly hard to imagine back home. Our thirst for infinite economic growth is not only fueling our climate and biodiversity crisis, but also the displacement of and violence against environmental defenders in Honduras, Latin America, and around the world. From Standing Rock to Triunfo de la Cruz, Black and Indigenous activists are often on the front lines of fights against the expansion of extractive industries and the destruction of ecosystems. The Garifuna peoples’ struggle to defend their territories is just one theater in a shared global struggle over the future of the planet and who gets to share in it.

The post In Honduras, Defending Your Land Can Be Deadly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I started working in repatriation efforts before I even knew what the term meant.

But repatriation—bringing our ancestors home—is in my blood. I grew up in a Cherokee community in Chewey, Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Sometimes I’ve wondered how my extended family could be as fortunate as we were, remaining isolated from the nearby towns, with a river running in front of us and a small creek behind. My relatives would tell me how much it was like our ancestors’ original home in the East, with mountainous terrain, ample water, and lush vegetation.

Over a century, my relatives fought for this Oklahoma home, traveling thousands of miles to push back against U.S. government overreach. Today, I continue the tradition by teaching a new generation of tribal officials how to work with the federal government to preserve what is ours. As a former “tribal historic preservation officer,” or a THPO, who reviews federal undertakings, it has been my job to step in when such projects threaten our sacred sites or our tribal interests.

My family’s land—where my grandmothers raised us—was a parcel that the U.S. government designated for individual Cherokees through the allotment process created by the Dawes Act of 1887. In the 19th century, allotment was presented as a way to “domesticate” us. I believe the real idea was to divide up families and scatter us about.

My great-grandfather, Osie Hogshooter, understood this. He had a significant role in an uprising against the allotment system, joining forces with Chief Redbird Smith, leader of the Keetoowah (Gi-du-wa) Nighthawks. The Nighthawks were traditionalists, full-blooded Cherokees who had made their way to Arkansas after ceding southeastern territory to the U.S. government in the late 1700s. They were distinct from the emigrant Cherokees who came to Indian Territory later, by way of the Trail of Tears, though both groups experienced forced displacement.

The Keetoowah Nighthawks knew that dividing our community would weaken our families, and the communal way of life that had sustained us through traumatic removals in the past. So a group of leaders, including my great-grandfather, who served as secretary, accompanied Chief Redbird Smith on a widely publicized journey to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Taft.

Unfortunately, the Nighthawks were not able to stop this moving freight train.

I learned about Osie’s participation in the Nighthawk campaign from my mother, Marie Bird, the only living person in our family who remembers him today, if vaguely, from when she was a little girl. She often spoke to me of the Nighthawks and all that they stood for. Osie refused his allotment, she told us, never living on it. When people filed to claim the land through squatters’ rights, we asked her, what do we do? She said, we do nothing—we stay away, just as Osie had. She always told me to stand up, and not to be afraid to speak my voice.

It wasn’t a stretch for me to get involved in a movement of my own, but I didn’t know what sort of movement it would be. I attended and graduated from an Indian boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; married, had three kids, worked taking care of my family.

As a young adult, I looked around our tribal communities and saw how divided we had become. Not just from family but from municipality. We didn’t have libraries. We didn’t have internet access. The rivers and creeks can only do so much for you, and we had to work for wages, but our job options were limited—chicken farms, manufacturing, any place within 30 miles each way. We shared rides, so you went to work where your neighbor did.

Stories about the Nighthawks lay dormant in my mind as I went through life’s struggles. If Osie, whose genes I shared, could educate himself about government and become a part of a movement to protect what is sacred to us, I could do the same.

Once my youngest child was a high school senior, I quit my job to enroll in the native studies program at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, something I had wanted to do since I was 18. I wanted to understand how the American government took over Cherokee lives and lands. I wanted to be able to explain why we were where we are, and how we got here, to my people back home. I wanted to continue the resistance.

A portrait of Osie Hogshooter, probably taken during his Washington, D.C. visit with the Keetoowah Nighthawk delegation. From The History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore by Emmet Starr (1921) / Author collection.

In college, I learned about sovereignty, and about federal Indian law. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law designed to protect “our cultural footprint” during construction. But the Act excluded the tribes. Which was one of the reasons why, in the name of progress, the federal government routinely flooded valleys where our people had lived since time immemorial in order to build dams. Our bones have interstates on top of them now. Anything found during construction got whisked away and placed on museum shelves. Institutions held our ancestors in collections, against their will. Who would choose to be in a box, far from your homeland?

I graduated from college in 2012, and then began to work within and sometimes against the complicated system that was emerging to bring our culture and people back home. Things had begun to change—slowly. In the early ’90s, Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act to include consulting tribes. It also passed the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which allowed us to recover our ancestors’ remains from faraway institutions.

I found my movement, and made this struggle my cause.

In 2015, I became the first-ever tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I created a process to give us a voice on the 300 projects the federal government proposed every month that posed a threat to our cultural footprint. When the federal government proposed selling leases to build a transmission line through Cherokee and other tribal lands, for instance, we figured out a path through the regulatory thicket to prevent the project. It never got built.

Across the U.S., THPOs have figured out ways to save our cultural heritage. Working with other tribes, for instance, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma developed a tribal monitoring policy for construction projects. Now, on certain projects, we accompany archaeologists working in historic preservation when they come in to determine what to save before a project. Things that signify a burial site for us might not be obvious to them. You take notes on what you see, we tell them, and we’ll take notes on what we see, and together we’ll come up with an agreement on how we’ll proceed with the project.

After two years, I left the Cherokee Nation to become a consultant to other tribes, to help them do this work. THPOs come from a wide range of backgrounds—we found our way here through different journeys, stumbling upon a job that we hadn’t even known was available. We are often overwhelmed by our workloads, by an alphabet soup of technical and legal acronyms we have to digest, by blanket U.S. government policies, and by the sheer number of projects that threaten to deplete our tribes’ cultural footprints.

Social media has lent a hand, creating a way for us to pool our experiences, but we have trouble communicating and educating on a broader scale. I searched high and low for a better way, and finally settled on a podcast to bring our tribal interests and landscapes together. “THPO Talk,” which I launched in the spring of 2022, connects preservation officers’ voices. We talk with federal partners, or any interested party who wants to understand our goals. Repatriation, international repatriation, historic preservation—we touch on it all. We support one another, and hope that in doing so, we will honor our ancestors, and assure our survival.

Our ancestors paid the ultimate cost, and paved the way for us to be resilient in this work. We’re telling our stories. We’re telling our grandchildren about the past and also about how to protect our future.

It wasn’t until I became a THPO that I went to Washington myself, to testify before a commission. While I was there, I found a Washington Post article that described my great-grandfather’s journey with the Nighthawks, more than a century earlier.

I wore moccasins that I had made myself. I looked down at my feet and I thought, I could be walking the same path Osie did.

The post Following in My Cherokee Great-Grandfather’s Footsteps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The histories of Indigenous peoples of the Americas are fascinating. Looking at the spectacular buildings of Machu Picchu, the walrus ivory carvings of the Canadian Arctic, and the effigy stone pipes of the Eastern Woodlands, and considering the extraordinary diversity of past and present Indigenous cultures, many people wonder at their origins.

How did the First Peoples survive the ice age and arrive on the continents? How did they adapt to the new environments in these lands?  Did they arrive 15,000 years ago, or 30,000 years ago? Where did their ancestors come from? How did they travel beyond the massive ice sheets that covered the northern portions of the continents during the Last Glacial Maximum? Indigenous peoples themselves have diverse and ancient histories of their own ancestors, some of which align with archaeological and genetic models of the past, and some of which do not.  A thousand questions drive legitimate and respectful conversations about the past.

In recent years, “alternative historians” have exploited this thirst to learn. Self-appointed “experts” or journalists such as Graham Hancock variously claim that the first people to enter the Americas were: from Europe, from sub-Saharan Africa, from Egypt  (some claim there’s an Egyptian city in the Grand Canyon and Egyptian artifacts in Burrow’s Cave in Illinois), giants (descended from an extinct human relative known as the Denisovans), travelers from the Black Sea region, Atlantean refugees, aliens, and alien mentees. The proponents of these claims have landed shows on Netflix and the History Channel, and book contracts. Sensationalism sells, as the viewership of the latest series in the genre, Netflix’s Ancient Apocolypse, demonstrates. Profiting off their visibility from media appearances, some grifters organize conventions, and offer “informal research expeditions” to “investigate megalithic sites without bias.”

While these purveyors make millions, their theories perpetuate a harmful and incorrect view of the origins of Native Americans. They cook up pseudo-histories by cherry picking “evidence” (often faked, misunderstood, or paranormal) to support a pre-determined outcome, and by eschewing hypothesis testing, peer review, and other tools of rigorous scientific inquiry. Scientists, skeptics, and scholars have debunked these claims, pointing out factual inaccuracies, identifying faked evidence, noting anti-Indigenous rhetoric, and delving into history and context that explain why the bogus claims emerged in the first place. But a lie can go halfway around the world before experts can debunk it.

Scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and scholars from multiple disciplines have spent decades compiling evidence about the First Peoples of the Americas—using genetics, professional archaeology, and knowledge passed down many generations among Indigenous communities to understand the histories of Indigenous peoples. One of the most recent tools available is the study of complete genomes from ancient peoples, which has allowed scholars to produce powerful models of biological histories and test relationships between past and present populations.

DNA recovered from ancient remains shows us that the First Peoples of the Americas have ancestral roots in Asia, and that they descend from two populations who mixed during the Upper Paleolithic era: One group related to the ancestors of present-day East (with affinities to some Southeast) Asians, and another group descended from a population called Ancient North Eurasians. The East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian groups came together approximately 25,000 years ago; soon after, the DNA evidence suggests, the intermingled population became isolated for a few thousand years, coinciding with the peak of the global climactic event called the Last Glacial Maximum, also known as the ice age.

During this period, human populations across the globe retreated to locations where resources were more abundant. Based on paleoclimactic reconstructions, some archaeologists, geneticists, and paleoclimatologists hypothesize that the population ancestral to the First Peoples may have moved to the southern coast of central Beringia (the land bridge which connected East Asia and West Alaska until the Earth warmed and sea levels rose, creating the Bering Strait).

The DNA evidence suggests that the Beringian population split into several branches. One moved into the Americas as soon as routes past the glacial ice sheets became accessible, after about 17,000 years ago, and gave rise to all peoples south of Alaska. Genetics and some traditional Indigenous histories indicate that people were present in the Pacific Northwest extremely early; the first movements into the Americas were likely by boat along the coast.   There is no genetic evidence that the earliest Native Americans were Europeans, ancient Israelites, or African mariners, as pseudo-historians sometimes assert.

At human occupation sites throughout North America and South America, a vast preponderance of archaeological evidence—securely dated physical traces of human activities in undisturbed geological contexts—demonstrates that these First Peoples were making homes in North and South America by around 15,000 to 16,000 years ago, and that they had no contact with any outside group (with very limited exceptions) before 1492.

There were some exceptions to their isolation. Genetic evidence hints that there may have been brief contact between Polynesian and South American populations approximately 800 years ago. The L’Anse aux Meadows site in northern Newfoundland contains wood-framed buildings and artifacts that confirm Norse people lived there between 900 and 1,300 years ago (congruent with narratives from both Vinland Sagas and Indigenous traditional histories). Human and animal footprints at the White Sands Locality 2 site may date back between 21,000 and 23,000 years, one group of scientists has (somewhat controversially) suggested. If their data—which align with the traditional histories of Indigenous peoples in the region—hold up to additional scrutiny, it would indicate that an earlier population predated the post-ice age expansion out of Beringia. This is one of the most exciting developments in the field in recent years, and is an area of active research by multiple archaeologists and geneticists.

But such exceptions do not support “alternative history” claims, particularly that the First Peoples of the Americas were anything other than the ancestors of present-day Native Americans, or that other Europeans besides the group at L’Anse aux Meadows entered the Americas prior to 1492. No burial mounds, stone pyramids, or ancient settlements were built by Egyptians, aliens, or a “lost race.”

Scientists don’t agree on a single, unified model for the peopling of the Americas. We debate which sites contain valid evidence of a human presence, how old they may be, and their significance. That’s a good thing. Disagreeing about how to interpret the archaeological record is the strength of the scientific method, not a weakness. It creates space for rigorous scrutiny of evidence and testing of hypotheses, which leads to a gradual accumulation of knowledge and the development of more accurate models of the past. It requires a profound humility to articulate how your ideas may be tested and proven wrong.

Archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and geneticists studying the earliest histories of the First Peoples are not immune to criticism. We are grappling with legacies of racisim against Native Americans, some which continue to persist within our disciplines. All too often, non-Native scientists ignore or treat disrespectfully traditional histories and Indigenous perspectives on their own past. We can and must do better.

But “alternative historians” and pseudo-archaeologists do not even acknowledge—let alone seek to root out—the racism and anti-Indigenous perspectives that are so integral to the stories they tell. Instead of trying to test hypotheses, they build cases for their pet theories—whether by co-opting Indigenous traditional histories to support racist theories, speculating wildly over single artifacts, or even looting Indigenous sacred sites to manufacture evidence.  When scholars or institutions attempt to debunk this charlatanism, the alternative historians deride them as part of a conspiracy to suppress “the great secrets of Earth history.”

But scientists care about what is actually true; the YouTube algorithm does not. There is a special kind of joy at the intersection of our love of the past and our love of solving puzzles. It’s familiar to those of us who feel goosebumps walking amid the ruins of ancient buildings, who read every historical marker on road trips, or who delight in the fingerprints of the potter marking ancient ceramics. We want to understand these large and tiny histories, and to see what the past was really like.

Embracing the joy in learning about the past and present cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—including learning about the peoples whose lands you are on and rejecting harmful and inaccurate narratives that drive a wedge between these peoples and their own histories—is the heart of science and the soul of humanity. Respectful curiosity is the starting point for understanding the past, including just how long Indigenous peoples have been on these continents. And it can start close to home: Close your laptop, and pay a visit to an ancient site.

The post No, Ancient Egyptians Did Not Build a City in the Grand Canyon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The story seems impossible to believe: A low-budget traveling slideshow kept oil drills out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But Indigenous leaders from the Arctic, environmental advocates on Capitol Hill, and grassroots activists across the United States all insist it’s true.

If you haven’t heard of The Last Great Wilderness, you’re not alone. During its many years on the road, the multimedia slideshow was not covered by the national media. Its photographs never became iconic. The people behind it remain unsung. And yet this humble work of activism, shared in such unassuming venues as college lecture halls, public libraries, and church basements, exerted an enormous impact on one of the biggest environmental fights in North American history. Its surprising success reminds us of the power of grassroots action to enact real change.

The Last Great Wilderness was born in response to the Ronald Reagan administration’s scheme to drill in the Arctic Refuge. Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska, much of the refuge was protected as permanent wilderness in 1980, but its coastal plain was left in legislative limbo. Considered sacred by the Gwich’in Nation and called the “biological heart” of the refuge by scientists, the coastal plain provided critical, life-sustaining habitat for caribou, polar bears, and a stunning array of migratory birds. The oil industry, the state of Alaska, and powerful politicians, however, argued that the land should instead be slated for fossil fuel extraction. Congress was left to decide its fate: grant the coastal plain wilderness status or allow oil development there.

Caribou Migration I, Coleen River valley, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, 2002. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee

As the debate raged, an aspiring photographer and former jazz drummer by the name of Lenny Kohm traveled in 1987 from California to Alaska, hoping to document the controversy for Audubon magazine. When Kohm arrived in the Arctic, he found himself awestruck by the spectacular wildlife he saw in the refuge and angered by the environmental devastation he witnessed in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. But it was the time he spent in two Gwich’in communities—Arctic Village, Alaska, and across the border, in Old Crow, Yukon—that completely changed his life. From the Gwich’in, Kohm learned that the media coverage of the refuge debate had left out a crucial part of the story. The framing was always a question of wilderness versus oil: Should the refuge’s vast coastal plain be protected as wild nature or handed over to the fossil fuel industry? This ignored what was at stake for the Gwich’in—their food security and cultural survival.

Since time immemorial, the Gwich’in people have stewarded Arctic lands and formed relations of responsibility with the caribou. Their stories, their spirituality, and their way of being in the world had always been tied to the Porcupine caribou herd. This herd, which currently numbers over 200,000 animals, journeys every year from its wintering grounds in northwestern Canada and northeastern Alaska, crossing steep mountains and icy rivers until the caribou reach the Arctic coastal plain, where they have their young. But the place where the caribou go to replenish their population was the exact place that the Reagan administration sought to turn into an oil field. This act, the Gwich’in explained to Kohm, would devastate the herd and lead to cultural genocide.

Kohm, who had never been involved in political organizing before, returned home to California and threw himself into activism, forming a small grassroots group called the Sonoma Coalition for the Arctic Refuge. The following year, he returned to Alaska. He did not come as a salvage ethnographer, seeking to create a visual record of a culture he believed was doomed to extinction. Instead, he sought to work with Gwich’in communities dotted across Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories to bring their voices to the forefront of the refuge struggle.

The Last Great Wilderness paired almost 250 slides taken by Kohm and 15 other photographers with a soundtrack and narration, and employed what was then considered cutting-edge technology—a fade-dissolve unit—so that the slide from one projector would fade out as the slide from the next projector would fade in. For the next two decades, from 1988 to 2008, Kohm and Gwich’in representatives took their show on tour, giving as many as 200 presentations a year. Their aim was not only to educate but also to empower—to turn spectators into activists.

Every event began the same way: Kohm would turn out the lights, and as the room darkened and as the projectors began to cast images on the screen, spectators could imagine themselves embarking on a journey to a distant land. But by the end of the show, many audience members would recognize how this remote place was entangled with their own lives. They would feel a sense of obligation to the photographed subjects—and to the Gwich’in representative standing before them. They would want to join this campaign to ensure the protection of Arctic ecosystems.

The title slide from The Last Great Wilderness, with caribou image likely photographed by Lenny Kohm. Courtesy of author.

Unlike the iconic “Crying Indian” commercial and the repeated media emphasis on recycling, individual action, and green consumerism as the answer to environmental problems, The Last Great Wilderness struck a chord with audiences because it addressed them not as consumers but as citizens—and sought to enlist them in this collective project to defend the Arctic Refuge. Running contrary to its name, The Last Great Wilderness also changed conventional perceptions of wilderness. Here the Arctic was presented not as some remote, faraway place, disconnected from human society, but as land stewarded for millennia by Indigenous peoples—and still vital to their culture, spirituality, and food security. This helped audience members grasp the urgent human rights issues at stake.

The Last Great Wilderness subscribed to the “trickle-up theory of politics,” where refuge activists believed that by galvanizing citizen voices and local media coverage, their political will would “trickle up” to national media outlets and policymakers in D.C. And while there were many close calls and tense moments when it seemed that Arctic drilling proponents would prevail during the two decades that the show toured, this approach staved off development time and again, often by convincing fence-sitting politicians to vote against oil drilling. Beyond the Beltway and outside the national media spotlight, The Last Great Wilderness cultivated networks of participation and action that lasted long after the show ended. Though the slideshow alone did not save the Arctic Refuge, without the people-first political movement it built, the coastal plain’s fate would have been sealed.

In our image-saturated, social media-dominated culture, the story of an analog slideshow no doubt seems quaint, a throwback to a very different era. Yet The Last Great Wilderness was remarkably prescient in its activism, which was built upon sincere listening and learning, and sharing power and authority with Indigenous nations. Its legacy carries on through to the present, as the Gwich’in, in the face of new threats from the oil industry, continue to share their story with the public to inspire more permanent protection for the Arctic Refuge.

Take what happened in 2017, when the election of Donald Trump, together with the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party, dealt a blow to refuge defenders, with the approval of Arctic Refuge drilling as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Nevertheless, the first-ever oil and gas lease sale of the refuge—held on January 6, 2021, at the same time that insurrectionists were storming the Capitol—turned out to be a bust. The lackluster sale resulted, in large part, from banking and corporate campaigns led by the Gwich’in alongside Iñupiat and environmental allies who made many industry leaders decide that drilling there would be a bad investment.

The Last Great Wilderness is a reminder of how slow, patient coalition work can turn the tide by activating and informing voters and helping them realize their voices really do matter. By bringing non-iconic images and Indigenous testimony to colleges, churches, and other grassroots venues across the country, a rambling activist, Gwich’in spokespeople, and local organizers took on the power of special interests and won. In the process, they established a model for how to transform a traditional wilderness battle into something else entirely: a struggle for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.

The post The Slideshow That Kept Oil Drills Out of the Arctic National Refuge appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For health reasons I have to stay out of the water for the next couple weeks so I am dreaming about surfing, thinking about surfing, writing about surfing, doing everything but actually getting wet.

In any given session I paddle over whitewash, holding myself up like I’m doing a pushup on the board while I paddle out toward the lineup to keep my momentum going, so I’m not pushed back towards the shore. The whitewater sweeps underneath me, brushes my nose, chills my hands. I paddle to take off—so much paddling, just always paddling—going right and gauge the angle of my rail in relation to the face of the wave. I balance. After the wave peters out and I paddle back out, I park myself in the water next to my board to pee and hope no shark swimming by mistakes my vertical body for a seal. I think about confidence.

I sit on my log in the lineup, waiting, watching the horizon (no glasses, no contacts, just vibes) in between bits of conversation. I say hi to everybody; I’m from a small town. I call my board a log but it’s not, it’s a performance longboard for a man twice my size, a literal dad board for going fast and doing longboard cutbacks. I prefer riding hand-me-downs. It’s another way to be connected with the people I surf with and the water I surf in.

I grew up surfing as a white settler on yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash land on the Central Coast of California. I grew up wearing a hand-me-down wetsuit to ride a dinged green yard sale funshape in the cold water of the future Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary; listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers; and in the traces of United States military infrastructure. I knew from a young age (and with lots of rage) that Junípero Serra had colonized what is currently called San Luis Obispo with Misión San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, in large part by enslaving Chumash people. I had no idea until recently, however, that the intertwined infrastructures of resource extraction and the United States Navy, which continue Serra’s legacy of colonization and extraction, had fundamentally shaped the built environment and accompanying values of my hometown full of surfers.

Surfing has a reputation for embodying all the most annoying and violent aspects of white masculinity, and for good reason. Contrary to its roots as a kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) cultural practice, modern surfing as widely distributed by white men has been a font of rugged masculinity, hyperindividualism, and conquering (especially when it comes to big waves). I’m thinking of white locals in my hometown telling visitors “we grew here, you flew here”; of white men stealing the waves of people they don’t know; of the way professional surf contests as late as the 2000s were set up to give women the worst conditions to surf in as well as far-from-equitable prize money; of white American men leasing private islands to capitalize on as surf resorts; of literal surf Nazis. I’m thinking of how in the early 20th century, the Manhattan Beach, California city council used eminent domain to take the land from the Bruces, a Black family. Of how it took the Bruce family nearly a century to recover their land.

Closer to my home, the economy in Morro Bay has largely revolved around the fossil fuel, military, tourism, and (associated) real estate industries since the early 20th century.

At the Chevron Estero Bay Marine Terminal, crude oil was loaded onto tankers from 1929 until 1999. In 1940, the U.S. Navy “established an amphibious training base” in Morro Bay due to its coastal location and harbor, town boosters Roger Castle and Gary Ream report in Images of America: Morro Bay. “By the end of the war,” Castle and Ream continue, “[the base] would occupy more than 250 acres and provide many improvements to the town.” These improvements included infrastructure in the commercial part of the harbor, the Embarcadero, that enabled the town to boom following the war. (It’s worth noting that there is no mention of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash history or culture in Castle and Ream’s book.) In the 1960s, the U.S. Navy built Defense Fuel Support Point Estero Bay just east of Highway 1 “to store and transport jet fuel to the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, California.” Its two tanks held roughly 4,350,000 gallons of jet fuel each. It is now a superfund site.

These industries offered high-paying jobs that afforded their employees—mainly white men—the ability to live on the coast. The white men who dominated these industries were, therefore, the same as those who dominated surf lineups. They brought the mentalities of the industries into the lineup with them. With this information, surfing begins to look less like a fun pastime and more an offshoot of a grim regime dependent on toxic chemicals, mass death, and uncheckable greed.

In The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay), explains the connection between surf culture and the genocidal policy of the settler state of Australia. She notes that as early as the start of the 20th century, ocean recreation activities (such as surfing) became a tool for white settlers to claim access and control to Indigenous land — practices further developed by policymakers who relegated Indigenous people inland and onto reserves and missions based on the legal fiction of terra nullius. This displacement was not accidental in Australia, nor was it in California.

This policy of genocide was not unique to Australia, but rather a transnational concentration of power in the hands of settler governments — of which the military is just one arm. In Moreton-Robinson’s words, “[i]t takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions. The regulatory mechanisms of these nation-states are extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession.”

The performance of masculinity in settler states like Australia and California is tightly linked with upholding colonizers’ whiteness. Whether those who perform them realize it or not, the aggressive behaviors listed above are grasps to maintain a status quo that overwhelmingly favors a white patriarchy that manages how wealth, power, and free time for recreation flow.

Yet this status quo is not set in stone. Surf Equity, a social movement that works for “equity, inclusion, and equal pay” for professional women surfers, organized and finally got women invited to the 2018 Maverick’s Challenge off of Half Moon Bay in California (though the contest, one of the preeminent global big-wave surf contests, didn’t go ahead that year). Practicing surfing as a shared activity across gender, age, and class lines is much more in line with how surfing was traditionally practiced in Hawai’i prior to colonization.

Crucially, since time immemorial, the lands and waters of what is currently called the Central Coast of California have been the home of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe. The proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will reinstate some Chumash sovereignty over these waters in a protected area that will extend from the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Ocean and climate scientist Priya Shukla points out that the sanctuary will not only restore “decision-making power to the original stewards of these natural resources” but also “[elevate] Chumash ‘thrivability’, which values the interconnectedness between the natural marine environment and local human community members.” I can’t wait to surf in it.

The post Surfing the Tides of History in Northern Chumash Land appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

They were aboard the first American commercial jet to land there since the United States and USSR had imposed a Cold War “Ice Curtain” across the Bering Sea some 40 years earlier. Orr, a 26-year-old Siberian Yupik Alaska Native, grew up on the tip of Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island, the mountains of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula visible on the western horizon. Her family’s shortwave radio sometimes picked up chatter in Russian. “That was the language of spies,” recalled Orr, who imagined Soviet frogmen splashing up on her village’s gravel beach.

The Alaska Airlines’ “Friendship Flight” helped melt the Ice Curtain by reuniting Alaska and Russia Native people separated for four decades. As soon as she made her way into Provideniya’s chaotic airport terminal that day, the first person Orr met was a member of her own St. Lawrence Qiwaghmii clan.

That flight and other headline-grabbing initiatives by citizen-diplomats to help end the Cold War launched decades of perilous but prolific progress. These citizen-led initiatives not only overcame a stalemate; they offered a durable model of grassroots international cooperation that could be useful around the world—and even in these familiar Northern climes, where the warming oceans have renewed geopolitical conflict over control of the Arctic.

The history of people-to-people connections here is an old one. After the Bering Land Bridge disappeared under the icy Bering Sea an estimated 18,000 years ago, indigenous peoples from Asia and North America plied the 55 miles between the Alaska and Russia in walrus-skin boats. These Inupiaq and Yupik people spoke common languages and shared similar subsistence cultures, with coastal residents surviving primarily on fish and marine mammals while interior Natives followed vast herds of reindeer, commonly known in Alaska as caribou.

The strait was the site of international cooperation during World War II, as the United States supplied nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease warplanes to assist the Soviet war effort. But soon after the war, Cold War suspicions froze those gestures of good will. The Soviets forcefully exiled Natives living on their own Big Diomede Island, replacing them with a military surveillance post aimed at Alaska.

In 1948, American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, with the concurrence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, decided national security interests outweighed those of the region’s Natives. The United States and USSR suspended a 10-year-old agreement permitting visa-free travel by Natives, replacing it with an Ice Curtain which sealed the border and isolated indigenous families on either side.

Darlene Pungowiyi Orr (left) of Alaska meets distant relatives from the Russian Far East village of Sireniki. Photo Courtesy of Darlene Orr.

For the next 40 years, Alaskans and Soviets eyed each other through rifle scopes and the cockpits of fighter jets. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, an Alaska-based U-2 spy plane drifted into Soviet airspace and was nearly shot down by Soviet MiG’s. In 1983, the Soviet military blew up a Korean civilian airliner in this same North Pacific neighborhood, killing all 269 on board.

By the 1980s, the last Alaska Natives to interact with long-lost relatives in the Soviet Far East wanted one final opportunity for reunification before passing from the scene. Their quest coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev encouraged interactions with the West, burnishing his image as an enlightened reformist.

But Alaska Natives faced intransigence from their own national government. President Ronald Reagan resisted people-to-people overtures as incompatible with his “peace through strength” foreign policy.

So average Alaskans joined the campaign to reunify Bering Strait Natives. Business and civic promoters also jumped at the prospect of contacts with the mysterious Soviet Union after 40 years of isolation.

A Nome realtor engaged in “balloon diplomacy,” attempting to launch weather balloons across the strait carrying goodie bags and messages of friendship. A Juneau musician led 67 Alaska Natives and other performers singing and dancing their way across the USSR to promote peace.

In 1987, a California endurance athlete swam the 2.5 miles between Alaska’s Little Diomede Island and Russian Big Diomede in 38-degree seas in nothing but a swimsuit, goggles, and cap to highlight Cold War tensions. A medical doctor born to glitterati Hollywood parents returned to his Alaska Native roots to dedicate his career to reuniting Bering Sea Natives by addressing their common health challenges.

These efforts finally won the blessing of both national governments and launched decades of chaotic but often productive interactions in business, culture, science, and education, with thousands of Alaskans and Russians crossing the International Date Line on regular flights by Alaska Airlines and other air carriers. Nearly 60,000 Russians learned western business practices in training centers set up by Alaskans across the Russian Far East. Enticed by Alaska’s guarantee of in-state tuition, more Russian students attended the University of Alaska Anchorage than any other American university.

Alaskans helped form dozens of Russian Rotary Clubs that improved care to elderly pensioners hit hard by the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. Alaska and Russia communities rushed to establish sister cities to strengthen civic and commercial ties. And scores of Alaskans and Russians married, settling in each other’s countries and advancing cultural understanding.

Endurance swimmer Lynne Cox approaches a snowy beach on Soviet Big Diomede Island after becoming the first person to swim across the Bering Strait from Alaska’s Little Diomede Island in 1987. Photo by Claire Richardson.

With the dawn of the 21st century, relations cooled across the strait as well as between Moscow and Washington. Russia’s rip-the-bandage-off transition to a market economy under Boris Yeltsin was too chaotic for many U.S. companies. Vladimir Putin’s subsequent rise to power was initially welcomed for stabilizing the economy, but as his regime restricted the operations of international companies and non-profits and infringed on human rights, many westerners ceased their involvement with the country.

Today in the Bering Strait air service is limited and visits are burdened by bureaucracy and high costs, so contacts are rare. Relations between countries at the highest levels also have deteriorated as tit-for-tat sanctions, expulsion of diplomats, and crackdowns on “foreign agents” harken back to the Cold War.

The year 2017 was the 150th anniversary of America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia. At many events marking the occasion, Alaskans said they remained inspired by the vision of William Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who consummated the Alaska purchase. Seward, a bold internationalist, believed Alaska could advance a U.S.-Russian relationship and strengthen America’s standing in the world.

Fulfilling Seward’s vision of U.S.-Russia cooperation could start with the natural affinity between citizens of the Far North regardless of national borders. Alaskans and nearby Russians are challenged by common problems—climate, geography, transportation, indifference from our national capitals—for which common solutions can work.

That’s especially the case among the indigenous peoples who struggle on both sides of the strait to preserve traditional languages and culture, combat substance abuse, and scratch out a subsistence way of life endangered by climate change. A 1989 U.S.-Soviet “visa-free” agreement for travel by Alaska and Russia Natives remains in place, but contacts suffer from costly and irregular transportation.

Managing a rapidly changing Arctic is the area of greatest potential cooperation between our countries. Nearly half the world’s Arctic falls within Russia, and the United States is an Arctic nation only because of Alaska. As Russia beefs up its fleet of some 40 ice-breaking vessels and opens scores of mothballed Soviet-era Arctic military bases, the United States and Russia should expand joint efforts for search and rescue, environmentally sound resource development, and scientific research.

Three decades ago, Alaskan and Russian citizen-diplomats melted the formidable Cold War Ice Curtain separating them in the face of significant resistance. Many were branded kooks, communists or worse. Juneau musician Dixie Belcher was summoned to the Alaska legislature to explain her suspected ties to the KGB, while Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper was criticized for cozying up to “reds.”

Darlene Orr was so inspired by that day-long visit to Provideniya that she mastered the Russian language and returned to the Russian Far East 13 times, dedicating her career to researching Native languages and native plants. On one trip, she ignored warnings about visiting restricted areas, dressed herself as an average Russian, and spent a long day on the coast harvesting seaweed and mushrooms.

“It was worth any risk to me to visit the shoreline where my ancestors had walked,” she said.

Inspired with courage and persistence like Darlene Orr, Alaska and Russia citizen-diplomats overcame enormous obstacles to transform history.

The post When Alaskan and Russian Native People Thawed the Cold War’s ‘Ice Curtain’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.