This event is a continuation of the series titled the Monthly Indigenous Voices Reading and Listening Circle, facilitated by Climate Justice Co-Chair S. Louie (settler). We will meet monthly on the last Thursday of each month.

Following the lead of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a San Francisco Bay Area organization led by urban indigenous women that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people, we will be reading together and discussing selections from the Recommended Reading List offered on the Sogorea Te' Land Trust’s website, Indigenous-created writings, art, or music about environmental and climate justice, and campaigns assessed in the 2021 Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon report. This report concluded that Indigenous resistance against carbon in the United States and Canada has kept BILLIONS of tons of carbon in the ground equivalent to one-quarter of annual emissions from both the U.S. and Canada combined!

Check out a suggested "reading" if you can:

This month's suggestions complement our July 19 Indigenous Speaker event, titled The Willow Project and Ambler Road: Indigenous Resistance to Extraction and Eco-colonialism in Alaska.

THE WILLOW PROJECT

Letter (pdf) from Native Village of Nuiqsut and Rosemary Ahtuangaruak (Iñupiaq), Mayor of the City of Nuitsuq [closest municipalities to the Willow Project], 01/25/23: "The Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) engagement with us is consistently focused on . . . how to permit the continuous expansion and concentration of oil and gas activity on our traditional lands. . . . We explain how the road will deflect caribou and make hunting more difficult, and BLM hears us asking for more road access. . . . We emphasize the importance of our life, health, and safety, and we watch as ConocoPhillips employees are evacuated from CD1 [a drill site that leaked in 03/22] . . . "

Actions and context from Native Movement, an Indigenous-led, Alaska-based nonprofit that organizes "toward dismantling colonial systems of oppression and boldly reshaping a healing path forward." Drilling In Willow Is A Health Crisis For Nuiqsut Residents, 02/09/23, 1 minute video.

More actions and context from Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic.

AMBLER ROAD

Tanana Chiefs Conference: "The Ambler Road Project is a proposal for a 211-mile industrial access road and is intended to facilitate the development of at least four large-scale mines and potentially hundreds of smaller mines across the region . . . "

Three 1-minute videos featuring Alaska Native voices, excerpted from the 28-minute documentary Paving Tundra

The Arctic Sounder Op-Ed by Angel Stickman (Kuuvangmiit), Ambler Road would ruin sacred land

Anchorage Daily News Op-Ed by Shield Downey (Inupiaq), There's a lot of talk about what we'd gain from the Ambler Road. But what would we lose?

Bobby Magill, Bloomberg Law, EV Mineral Bonanza on Alaska Tribal Land Turns On Disputed Road

ECO-COLONIALISM

Hamza Hamuchene, "Energy Transitions and Colonialism": "A green and just transition must fundamentally transform and decolonize our global economic system. . . . It also necessitates an overhauling of the production and consumption patterns that are energy-intensive and utterly wasteful, especially in the global North. . . . In a global context of an imperial scramble for influence and energy resources, any talk about green transition and sustainability must not become a shiny façade for neocolonial schemes of plunder and domination."

For The Wild podcast, "Kyle Whyte on the Colonial Genesis of Climate Change" episode [audio, transcript]:

[Interviewer:] "Can you speak to the ways in which our greenwashed pursuit of climate justice will continue Indigenous dystopias?"

Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi): "As we move toward greener technologies, [will people] be able to work together in ways that are ethical, and just [?] . . . When [sustainable] technologies proliferate, even if they might be associated with the lowering of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, . . . it's still people impacted by other forms of domination that are not winning. . . . Most attempts to reform the energy system do not make it possible for tribes or neighborhoods of color to be central to those new energy networks. In fact, we're often excluded from them. . . ."

If you’re interested in a low pressure, high connection way to hang out, learn, and reflect together about decolonization, rematriation, and how communities are healing the history of the land and our relationship to it, come join us!