The rate of exploitation is astounding. In 1975, 100 percent of all federally produced uranium in the United States came from Indian reservations, so that Indians were the fifth largest producers of uranium in the world. That same year, four of the 10 largest coal strip mines in the United States were on Indian reservations. By 1985, Dene and Cree lands in Saskatchewan were producing more than $1 billion worth of uranium annually for foreign multinationals. . . .
          Through it all, indigenous people will continue to struggle. It is this legacy of resistance that, perhaps more than any other single activity, denotes the essence of 1992. After all the hoopla and celebration by the colonial governments are over, the Native voice will prevail. It is like a constant rumble of distant thunder, and it says through the wind, "We are alive. We are still here."

every step of the nuclear cycle--from uranium mining, to bomb "testing", and waste dumping--is conducted on indigenous people's lands. what does this say about who benefits from this death-promoting activity and what the real purposes of this process of annihilation is for? whose interests are being served by this omnicidal process?

-- ratitor

[Credit line: Reprint permission granted by
                Sojourners, P.O. Box 29272, Washington D.C. 20017]

WE ARE STILL HERE
THE 500 YEARS CELEBRATION
by Winona LaDuke

The ecological agenda is what many indigenous people
believe can, and must, unite all peoples in 1992.

Columbus later returned to Europe in disgrace,
but the invasion set into motion a struggle over
values, religions, resources, and, most important, land.

In school I was taught the names
Columbus, Cortez, and Pizzarro and
A dozen other filthy murderers.
A bloodline all the way to General Miles,
Daniel Boone and General Eisenhower.

No one mentioned the names
Of even a few of the victims.
But don't you remember Chaske, whose spine
Was crushed so quickly by Mr. Pizzaro's boot?
What words did he cry into the dust?

What was the familiar name
Of that young girl who danced so gracefully
That everyone in the village sang with her--
Before Cortez' sword hacked off her arms
As she protested the burning of her sweetheart?

That young man's name was Many Deeds,
And he had been a leader of a band of fighters
Called the Redstick Hummingbirds, who slowed
The march of Cortez' army with only a few
Spears and stones which now lay still
In the mountains and remember.

Greenrock Woman was the name
Of that old lady who walked right up
And spat in Columbus' face. We
must remember that, and remember
Laughing Otter the Taino who tried to stop
Columbus and who was taken away as a slave.
We never saw him again.

In school I learned of heroic discoveries
Made by liars and crooks. The courage
Of millions of sweet and true people
Was not commemorated.

Let us then declare a holiday
For ourselves, and make a parade that begins
With Columbus' victims and continues
Even to our grandchildren who will be named
in their honor.

Because isn't it true that even the summer
Grass here in this land whispers those names,
And every creek has accepted the responsibility
Of singing those names? And nothing can stop
The wind from howling those names around
The corners of the school.

Why else would the birds sing
So much sweeter here than in other lands?

        -- Columbus Day, by Jimmie Durham (West End Press, 1983)

          To "discover" implies that something is lost. Something was lost, and it was Columbus. Unfortunately, he did not discover himself in the process of his lostness. He went on to destroy peoples, land, and ecosystems in his search for material wealth and riches.
          Columbus was a perpetrator of genocide, responsible for setting in motion the most horrendous holocaust to have occurred in the history of the world. Columbus was a slave trader, a thief, a pirate, and most certainly not a hero. To celebrate Columbus is to congratulate the process and history of the invasion.
          The Taino, Arawak, and other indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the first "hosts of Columbus," were systematically destroyed. Thirteen at a time they were hanged, in honor of the 12 apostles and the Redeemer. Every man over 14 years of age was obliged to bring a quota of gold to the conquistadors every three months. Those who could not pay the tribute had their hands cut off "as a lesson." Most bled to death. The Taino leaders argued with the conquistadors. They pleaded that "with their thousands of people grow[ing] enough corn to feed many of the people of Europe--was that not enough of a tribute, of a payment?"
          The conquistadors would not accept their tribute from the land. So the "idle" ships of the second voyage of Columbus were used to transport back 500 Indians to be slaves to the markets of Seville. The repression was so brutal that many of the Taino, Caribs, and Arawaks, faced with brutality and slavery at the hands of conquistadors, chose instead to commit mass suicide.
          Sixty years later, in 1552, the Catholic priest Bartoleme de las Casas declared that within the entire Western Hemisphere, a total of 50 million Indians had already perished in just over a half-century of Spanish invasion. Las Casas had been an eyewitness to some of the slaughter and depopulation caused by diseases accidentally introduced by the Spanish. In his protest of his own people's "abominable cruelties and detestable tyrannies," Las Casas cried out that five million had died on the Caribbean islands and that 45 million had died on the mainland. (In 1492, in the Western Hemisphere, there were 112,554,000 American Indians. By 1980, there were 28,264,000 American Indians.)
          Although Columbus himself later returned to Europe in disgrace, his methods were subsequently used in Mexico, Peru, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek in TK. They are still being used in Guatemala and El Salvador, and in Indian territory from Amazonia to Pine Ridge in South Dakota. The invasion set into motion a process, thus far unabated. This has been a struggle over values, religions, resources, and, most important, land.

THE "AGE OF DISCOVERY" marked the age of colonialism, a time when our land suddenly came to be viewed as "your land." While military repression is not in North American vogue (at least with the exception of the Oka-Mohawk uprising of the summer of 1990), today legal doctrines uphold that our land is your land, based ostensibly on the so-called "doctrine of discovery." This justifies in the white legal system the same dispossession of people from their land that is caused by outright military conquest. But in a "kinder, gentler world," it all appears more legal.
          The reality is that the battering has been relentless. With each generation more land has been taken from indigenous peoples, either by force or by paper, but in no case with our consent. Today, Indian people in North America retain about 4 percent of their original land base--land called reservations in the United States or reserves in Canada.
          And those remaining lands are facing a new assault. Underlying Indian reservations are approximately two-thirds of the uranium resources within the continental United States and one-third of all Western low-sulphur coal. Other lands include vast oil tracts (including that in the so-called Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--the last unexploited portion of the north shore of Alaska) and final stands of pristine water and unexploited old-growth timber. The statistics for Canada are much the same.
          What we have is still what they want: whether it is EXXON, ARCO, Rio Tinto Zinc (the British mining giant), COGEMA (the French uranium company that is active in Dene and Cree lands in northern Saskatchewan), or lumber companies from Japan or North America. The North American onslaught is matched only by that in South and Central America, where remaining rain forests and resource-rich lands are greedily consumed by foreign multinationals and governments.
          The rate of exploitation is astounding. In 1975, 100 percent of all federally produced uranium in the United States came from Indian reservations, so that Indians were the fifth largest producers of uranium in the world. That same year, four of the 10 largest coal strip mines in the United States were on Indian reservations. By 1985, Dene and Cree lands in Saskatchewan were producing more than $1 billion worth of uranium annually for foreign multinationals.
          An area the size of France in northern Quebec has been devastated by hydroelectric development in a huge James Bay project, which is the largest manipulation of a subarctic ecosystem in history. The lands flooded are those of the Cree and Inuit--two peoples who have lived there for 10,000 years or more in a carefully balanced way of life. Today, thousands more face relocation as new dams are proposed for European aluminum interests (who will locate in Quebec to secure cheap electricity) and American consumers. The devastation of the ecosystems and the people is relentless. In short, the problem or challenge posed by 1992 is the invasion, and the reality is that it continues.
          We understand that "to get to the rain forest, you must first kill the people," and that is why since 1900 one-third of all indigenous nations in the Amazon have been decimated, while during the same time one-quarter of the forest has disappeared. There is a direct relationship between how industrial society consumes land and resources and how it consumes peoples.
          In the past 150 years, we have seen the extinction of more species than since the ice age. And since 1492, we have witnessed the extinction of more than 2,000 indigenous peoples from the Western Hemisphere. Where are the Wappo, the Takelma, the Natchez, and the Massachuset?

MOST DISGRACEFUL OF all is the self-congratulatory hoopla under way in most colonial and neocolonial states. In 1992, the governments of Spain, Italy, the United States, and 31 other countries are hosting the largest public celebration of this century to mark the 500th anniversary of the arrival of "Western civilization" in the hemisphere.
          As planned, it will outstrip the bicentennials of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the French Revolution in scale and cost, and in the callous rewriting of history. The multibillion-dollar official extravaganza includes a race to Mars between three solar-powered spaceships named after Columbus' Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria; a "Tall Ships" regatta, featuring replicas of Columbus' original vessels, which will leave Spain in the spring of 1992 for a tour of the Americas; and Expo '92 in Seville, involving more than 100 countries and emphasizing Spain's contributions to world culture.
          It is in the face of this celebration of genocide that thousands of indigenous peoples are organizing to commemorate their resistance, and to bring to a close the 500-year-long chapter of the invasion. Indigenous organizations such as CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), SAIIC (South and Central American Indian Information Center), the Indigenous Women's Network, Seventh Generation Fund, the International Indian Treaty Council, UNI (from the Brazilian Amazon), and other groups have worked to bring forth the indigenous perspective on the past 500 years.
          For several years, indigenous people appealed to the United Nations to designate 1992 as the "year of indigenous peoples." They faced stiff political opposition from Spain, the United States, and other "pro-Columbus" nations. 1993, instead, has been designated as such. However, a number of indigenous nations are actively working on the United Nations Environment Program Conference in 1992 in Brazil and demanding, among other things, full participation of indigenous peoples in the "nation state" agenda.
          CONAIE and other groups hosted an intercontinental meeting of indigenous peoples in Quito, Ecuador, in July 1990. The meeting brought together hundreds of people from throughout the Americas to share common histories and strategies to mark 1992, and to plan for the next 500 years. It was hailed by the Native people in attendance as a fulfillment to a traditional prophecy of the Runa people of Mexico.
          The prophecy reports that many years ago the indigenous people of the Americas were divided into two groups, the people of the Eagle (those from the North) and the people of the Condor (those from the South). According to the prophecy, when the tears of the Eagle and the Condor are joined, a new era of life and spirit will begin for Native people. As the delegates joined together in work, prayer, and ceremony, they felt a joining of the vision and the people. According to CONAIE, "The basic objective of the mobilization is to recover the dignity of our peoples and reject all forms of submission, colonial practices, and neo-colonialism."
          A number of other meetings have been held, including a huge First Peoples Gathering in June in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which was attended by more than 500 representatives from the Americas. Other work continues among indigenous nations, internal in the communities, and in coalition with other groups. A series of tribunals on colonialism have been proposed in several locations in North America, as well as educational and cultural events. A number of Native writers, including Gerald Vizenor, M. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Joy Harjo, are completing books and anthologies on the 500 years. And a great number of indigenous peoples are calling on other groups--nationally and internationally--to mobilize around 1992 as a year to protect the Earth and the people of the Earth.
          Indeed, the ecological agenda is what many indigenous people believe can, and must, unite all peoples in 1992. That agenda calls for everyone to take aggressive action to stop the destruction of the Earth, essentially to end the biological, technological, and ecological invasion/conquest that began with Columbus' ill-fated voyage 500 years ago.
          Through it all, indigenous people will continue to struggle. It is this legacy of resistance that, perhaps more than any other single activity, denotes the essence of 1992. After all the hoopla and celebration by the colonial governments are over, the Native voice will prevail. It is like a constant rumble of distant thunder, and it says through the wind, "We are alive. We are still here."

That dream
Shall have a name
After all,
And it will not be vengeful
but wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge
And it will rise
in this heart
which is our America.

      From Sand Creek, by Simon Ortiz (1981)

Winona LaDuke is president of the Indigenous Women's Network and a member of the Anishinabe Nation.

Orignally published in Sojourners, October 1991