Resistance to the North Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock brought greater media and public attention to Native peoples and our struggles with environmental injustice. It also provided a means for the public to express fears over the environmental threats posed to the Earth by unchecked corporate and governmental exploitation of fossil fuels.
Native Americans, however, have been hollering for generations about the global impact of fossil fuels and the poisoning of water, land, and fish from mining, industrial farming, and industry to anybody who would listen. Native folks knew that eventually non-Indigenous people would hear them and realize that no one is immune to the fallout from the colonialism and corporate greed that drives so much of our economy with little concern for the planet’s health.
As Philip Deere, a Muskogee spiritual leader, said back in 1981, “The time is coming. Multinational corporations don’t care what color you are; they’re going to step on you. They’re going to slap you in the face like they did the Indians.”
[For more on this story by Mary Annette Pember, go to https://www.yesmagazine.org/is...t-the-earth-20181220]
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