By Mordecai Specktor
A coming assault on Mother Earth
I’ve read numerous 2024 election post-mortems. The New Yorker magazine’s Nov. 7 issue featured an array of election reflections by scholars and authors.
For example, author Lorrie Moore pondered the “continued appeal” of Trump, whose “animal intelligence has slightly diminished and become a little more deranged. But his unique and inscrutable charisma is still apparently there, though its precise nature is hard to anatomize.”
In other words, how has this con man and rapist bamboozled the masses?
“‘We will not go back’ was Harris’s rallying cry,” Moore added. “But the back came for us.”
Like many of you, I’ve been puzzling over the precise shape of the fascistic regime in the offing. Will the convicted felon and his ilk, a collection of grifters and medical quacks, plunge the U.S. into chaos? We’ll find out pretty soon.
The Orange Führer, a climate change denier, convened oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago estate and offered a deal to roll back environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations. He’s a transactional guy, as pundits have noted. He vows to “drill, baby, drill,” ramp up fossil fuel production, when he returns to the Oval Office.
And we can expect a raft of executive orders undoing various Biden initiatives to protect Native sacred sites and derail destructive mining schemes. On the latter point, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced in late November that “it will suspend its review of the NewRange project’s copper-nickel sulfide permit until late next year. This decision marks a victory for environmental and water conservation groups that have long raised concerns about the mine’s practices,” as per the Quetico Superior Wilderness News. (PolyMet Mining is now known as NewRange Copper Nickel.)
The NewRange project, a $1 billion venture, would involve an open-pit mine near Babbit and a processing plant by Hoyt Lakes. Ojibwe bands in northern Minnesota have expressed concerns about sulfate pollution from the proposed mine damaging wild rice beds.
With Trumpite federal regulators doing the bidding of corporations, rubber-stamping every insane energy and mining development that comes down the pike, popular resistance will be needed at the state and local levels. There’s no Planet B, as they say.
Remembering Annie Mae Aquash
In my Aug. 2023 column, I wrote about Kevin McKiernan’s documentary “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock,” an examination of a violent period, 1973-1976, on the Pine Ridge reservation (So. Dakota).
I noted that the FBI “unleashed dirty and criminal operations under the rubric of COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), which engendered suspicions leading to the disruption and destabilization of AIM [American Indian Movement]. A notable victim of the FBI’s dirty tricks regime was Anna Mae Aquash, an AIM activist from Nova Scotia.”
A new documentary series, “Vow of Silence: The Assassination of Annie Mae,” directed and produced by Yvonne Russo, looks at the long quest for justice in the murder of the AIM activist. The four-part series, which is streaming on Hulu, provides viewers with background on Anna Mae (née Pictou), her journey to Native rights activism and her family’s efforts to get to the bottom of her execution-style killing, in Dec. 1975, on a remote area of the Pine Ridge rez.
Around 20 years, I wrote about the murder of Annie Mae, a member of the Mi’kmaq nation, for News from Indian Country. Paul DeMain, the editor who encouraged my writing, is featured in “Vow of Silence.” He suffered recriminations for his journalism on this story; and it was an uncomfortable time writing the article for me, too. What I found in my investigation conforms to the general outline of the Hulu documentary series, which offers an unflattering picture of the AIM leaders. In the 1980s, I spent time in Indian Country and got to know the AIM leadership: Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Russell Means, et al. They all have traveled on.
“Vow of Silence” tells a tragic and heartbreaking story of a movement that turned on one of its own. Following the June 26, 1975, shootout at Oglala, in which two FBI agents and an Indian man were killed, Annie Mae was arrested several times and then released in what is seen as the FBI’s attempt to put a “snitch jacket” on her, to create the impression that she was an informant.
In the end, two AIM activists, John Graham and Arlo Looking Cloud, were convicted for her murder. Graham, who is serving his sentence for felony murder in the Sioux Falls prison, organized gatherings to opposed uranium mining in northern Saskatchewan in 1980 and 1981, which I attended. I met Graham and some of his fellow activists in 1980, at the International Indian Treaty Conference, on the Fort Belknap reservation (Montana). Graham maintains his innocence.
