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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (June 12, 2015)
Street Roots • June 12-18, 2015 GORGE, from page 12 giant cardboard heads. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, posters started to pop up all over town showing a sickly-looking Hales flanked by oil wells, covered with the text “Fossil Fuel Charlie for Mayor 2016.” On May 7, the day after fossil fuel Tories were thrown out of office, the mayor finally dropped his support for the $500 million project, and urged the company to leave Portland. The activists who rattled the mayor are part of what they call “the thin green line” - a network of environmental activists in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia who are working to stop more than 29 fossil fuel expansion and export projects in the Northwest, citing damage to air quality, waterways, coastlines and the global climate. And in front of that thin green line is B fierce red one, made up of Native Americans with deep spiritual connections to the local landscape. These Native Americans carry an intergenerational struggle to protect their lands from a style of development that is, by any historical standard, utterly foreign to the North American landscape. Consultation and accommodation: A tale of two cultures A glimpse of this cultural conflict over land can be seen in over-confident statements from Port Director Wyatt, who argued back in September that massive shipments of propane in the Columbia Gorge “add tremendous value to the river” by accelerating the transformation of the river through dredging and jetty expansion. Paul Lumley, executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, begs to differ. “Adding value to the river means restoration of natural resources for the benefit of all members of the public,” he said. “Destroymg the river, or even parts of it, does not add value.” Despite signing treaties of mutual accommodation, there is an obvious difference between the European and Native approach to making a living on the land. Too often, the story of European development in the U.S. has taken on the qualities of what environmental essayist Barry Lopez has called “a ruthless, angry search for wealth” - a religious crusade to mine commodities from landscapes instead of living within them, poisoning water and wrecking food sources in the process. This situation has not changed nearly as much as we would like to believe. “Gold is excellent, gold is treasure, and he who possesses it does whatever he wishes in this life and succeeds in helping souls into paradise,” wrote Christopher Columbus. “Energy is the lifeblood of America’s economy,” Fox News personality Sean Hannity said to a conference of Bakken oil executives last year. “What you have been able to show this country is nothing short of a miracle.” In May the Lummi Nation held a treaty rights conference in Seattle that gathered more than 150 people to strategize on how to support indigenous struggles, rather than talking past them, in the fight against fossil fuels and climate chaos. The Lummi told the audience that their fight to stop the biggest coal export project in the U.S, is crucial to mankind’s survival. “Our resistance is your resistance. If we lose, you are lost,” said councihnember Jay Julius. Commentary Although we usually speak of Oregon and Washington as fossil fuel roadblocks, the westward shipment of fossil fuels would also cross the territory of at least 38 sovereign First Nations in Oregon and Washington, and many more in British Columbia. One of these is the Unist’ot’en Band of the Wet’suwet’en, which has blocked multiple pipelines for several years by occupying their unceded territory, and building traditional houses in the path of the pipeline. Affirming the rights of those nations to assert their sovereignty and to receive full recognition from government entities that owe it to them has become an increasingly loud demand in the fight for climate justice. Page 13 scope of their decision was very limited - an opinion that has actually landed them in court with environmental groups, who say they did not even estimate their air pollution impacts properly. According to Lumley, “These trains would be going right by our traditional fishing sites, right by our river-side communities. The risk of an explosion, particularly for a propane train, or of an oil spill and derailment, would be very devastating. The loss of life is not something we want to risk, and my member tribes have expressed serious concern about this.” In the run up and immediate aftermath of the April 7 Portland Sustainability Commission’s vote, Tom Armstrong and the " I te stifie d before the PSC th a t eeasaltatloa lias aot ooearred» Tea w e a ld th la k the oae message they eealda^t take away was th a t they i l l o ea sa ltatlo a f b at they did« People who knew better waab ed to fast cheek the box aad say eeasaltatloa happeaed beeaase X spoke« T h a fs aot how eeasaltatloa w o rks/* ' ; ‘ ' PAUL LUMLEY C X E C U T IV E D IR E C T O R O F T H E .C O L U M B IA R iV E R IN TE R T R IB A L FISH C O M M IS S IO N mayor’s staff effectively said that sending Government-to-Government Relations (It’s unread ¿-mails to tribal representatives is really not that hard!) consultation enough, and gave no indication One way to estimate the extent of such that they searched for potential impacts to recognition is through the official process of cultural resources. government-to-government consultation. ¡ This was likely the source of rumors that Consultation is a necessary ingredient for bothered CRITFC. In a brief interview after any government entities that need to the hearing, Armstrong told this writer that accommodate one another, including state “there are no established protocols” for agencies Consulting each other, like thé tribal consultation in Portland - information Department of Forestry and the Department he left out in his PSC testimony to of Fish and Wildlife. For tribal governments, Commissioner Gray. aiiy potential decision that can affect their Paradoxically, both state and city officials trèaty-reserved resources requires that the contended that they were engaged in a sort responsible government agencies enter into of consultation,’but in an ad-hoc manner that consultation with those tribes. This allows they apparently hoped would end as quickly the affected government body to address and as possible. “I testified before the PSC that resolve the conflict early on, before a consultationjias not occurred,” explains decision has been made, and long before any Lumley. “You would think the one message action has béen taken - similar to relations they couldn’t take away was that they did between state agencies or city bureaus. consultation, but they did. People who know Failure to doso risks violating federal treaty better wanted to just check the box and say rights, state and local laws, federal statutes - consultation happened because I spoke. and international human rights law. That’s not how consultation works.” The city of Boardman, for instance, could One belief leading to this confusion was have avoided last year’s conflict over the the perception that tribes only have Coyote Island coal export terminal if it had a influence with the federal government. local consultation policy in place. Instead, However, according to Gabe S. Galanda, a after years of planning, the Department of practicing attorney in Washington state who •State Lands shot down the project last year specializes in defending tribes and Indian- after tribes told the state it was planned on owned interests. top of a traditional fishing site. “In the Pacific Northwest, the However, it seems Oregon state agencies, consequences to a local government for and especially Portland city bureaus, are failing to honor the normative tenet of inter unsure about how to approach consultation governmental consultation could include with Native American tribes, and are significant liability for violation of guaranteed particularly confused about the difference federal Indian Treaty rights or destruction of between desired and required. For instance, tribal historic or cultural properties. Beyond when DEQ altered the air quality permit at that, it is simply a best governmental Port Westward in Clatskanie, they effectively practice to consider whether the rights of legalized 1,000 oil trains coming through the sister governments might be implicated by Columbia Gorge every year. Did DEQ local government action.” consult tribes before letting oil trains start Paul Lumley highlighted the absurdity of crowding their fishing sites? According to the city assuming tribal support for DEQ’s Tribal Liaison Christine Svetkovich, Pembina’s project prior to the April hearing. the answer is both yes and no, DEQ did tell “Would the city e-mail the state, then tribes what was happening, but did not assume they’ve signed off on a project search for potential impacts to treaty rights, because they don’t respond? It’s the same and did not acknowledge that their decision with tribes - we are sovereign governments could trigger impacts to treaty-reserved just like the state of Oregon.” resources. Instead, DEQ insisted that the “Free Trade” vs Indigenous Rights At the April 1 PSC hearing, Cathy Sampson-Kruse attempted to emphasize that point, but Chair Baugh cut her off quickly, saying his staff would look into the matter. In a push to support Pembina, he would later describe barriers to free trade as a form of colonization, after distracting commissioners from the indigenous concerns that were actually in the room. “We industrialized this nation over the indigenous people here and told them the same thing and polluted this planet,” Baugh intoned. “Now we’re gonna sit here and say ‘no’?” In reality, it is Pembina Pipeline Corp, that currently stands accused of industrializing Canada on the backs of indigenous peoples by polluting their water and ruining their hunting grounds, and now indigenous peoples are saying “no.” In early March a first-of-its-kind lawsuit Was filed by the Blueberry River First Nations in British Columbia, aiming to stop all new oil and gas developments in their territory, where Pembina gets its tracked gas. The tribes say these operations are a violation of their treaty from 1900, which promised natives they could continue their traditional ways of life in exchange for opening up their lands to European settlement. Instead they’ve seen over 16,000 oil and gas wellst and over 28,000 kilometers of pipelines, with depressing impacts on water quality, fish and wildlife. It’s worth remembering that two weeks before planners voted,on its pjpejipe^ Pembina abruptly promised a $3 million “community investment fund” to help the city implement its Climate Action Plan - a kindly gesture to offset its carbon emissions. In 2008, Pembina also consulted with the Canadian indigenous environmental group REAC, promising off-sets to a pipeline right- of-way through Alberta, Canada for the Nipisi and Mitsue pipelines, carrying diluent and tar sands. It promised REAC directors extensive restoration of caribou habitat, representing five times the footprint of the right-of-way: a forest that would be permanently clear cut to make way for the pipeline. The promise was exciting enough for REAC to drop its opposition to the new pipeline, despite fears that another pipeline could push the caribou herds into extinction. What came next? According to REAC director Julie Asterisk, “The area they re-planted was miniscule and far less than we agreed to. We were left with the sickening feeling that we got suckered.” According to Doug Badger, another director of REAC, Pembina prefers to avoid consultation altogether and regularly gives out cash envelopes to tribal members instead. “Pembina is not to be trusted,” Badger said. “This is a company that thinks money can buy them anything - except restoration for the habitat they destroyed.” Doug and other indigenous activists of Alberta remain cautiously optimistic that the new NDP government can restore respectful relations with indigenous peoples and provide redress for habitat destruction through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
