It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of New York City’s first slave market, and the first modern financial instruments were developed to collateralize Black bodies in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The roots of the modern financial industry grew strong off stolen land and stolen bodies. Today a growing pipeline divestment movement, catalyzed by the struggle at Standing Rock, is again making the connections clear between Wall Street investment banks and ongoing colonization and racial oppression in this country. Earlier this year, leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux called upon water protectors and those fighting for indigenous sovereignty to take opposition to the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from the burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux to the boardrooms of the financial institutions funding the pipeline. [Read a more in-depth review of the struggle at Standing Rock here.] Where bodies and prayers alone could not stop the pipeline construction, Native leaders tried speaking in a language that Energy Transfer Partners and their financiers might understand better: money.

#DefundDAPL: Prayerful Resistance

The #DefundDAPL campaign was born, taking lessons from past and ongoing social movements that have effectively used divestment campaigns to end Apartheid in South Africa, pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestine, weaken the tobacco industry, shift university endowments out of fossil fuel companies, and more.

Since the call to divest earlier this year, grassroots campaigns have pushed nearly a dozen cities and tribes across the continent – from Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Nez Perce in Idaho  – to divest public money from financial institutions funding resource extraction, mass incarceration, and predatory banking practices. To date, roughly $5 billion of public money has been pledged for divestment from the financiers of DAPL, and another $83 million of personal funds have been shifted out of these banks (much of that into local credit unions and community banks).

Here in Huichin, (the Ohlone name for what is now Oakland and Northern Alameda County, California), a coalition of Native leaders, Oakland residents and workers, and community members impacted by nearby fossil fuel refineries recently succeeded in changing the City of Oakland’s banking policies. Banks that wish to contract with the City must now disclose any material support for companies 1) constructing or operating DAPL, 2) operating or profiting from private prisons or detention centers, or 3) otherwise contributing to violations of indigenous sovereignty. Read the full ordinance here. The new policy also requires depositories to address racial disparities in their local lending practices, acknowledging a history of discriminatory, predatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unequal lending practices in Oakland communities of color.

All oppressions are interconnected, all healings are interconnected

Key to success for many of these municipal divestment campaigns has been highlighting the interconnected nature of oppressions funded by a small number of large banks. It is largely the same institutions that are simultaneously profiting off fossil fuel pipelines, private prisons, fraudulent banking services, and home foreclosures – all activities that disproportionately harm communities of color, yet harm all “downstream” communities regardless of race. We all need clean water, clean air, and healthy soil to survive – even bankers.

Our coalition, Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, formed shortly after several of us returned from Standing Rock in November and December 2016. Energized by that experience and the early success of Seattle’s campaign to divest from Wells Fargo, our initial coalition quickly realized that we needed to slow down and build authentic relationships of trust and accountability between Native peoples and non-native people working together. After several meetings where we discussed what Native leadership should look like for us in the context of this divestment campaign, at least two things became clear to me: 1) this work was about divesting from far more than just a few corporations, but from an entire worldview and model of leadership rooted in domination; and 2) that our coalition needed to go slow to go far and cultivate patience in moments of perceived crisis.

The way we conducted coalition meetings, our approach to working with City Councilmembers, our understanding of how state power operates and how to build community power all shifted when we took time to slow down and ground ourselves in the understanding of Native peoples in the coalition. It is not just about changing particular laws (though there are thousands that need changing), but changing the very way that policy is made. At the Law Center, we have launched a new project to focus on just that: Transformative Policymakers.

Members of Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin in front of Oakland City Hall

As more and more cities move to divest from financiers of DAPL and other pipelines, an uneasy conundrum still exists: nearly every financial institution large enough to provide the banking services needed to run a city are in some way invested in the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons.

This is an integral part of the story we need to be telling though: neither Wall Street nor the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons can exist without the other. From the very beginning, the entire system of international banking and finance has relied on extractive economies to drive profits. Thus, the Native-led #DefundDAPL movement is not just about disciplining one bank for funding one pipeline or one private prison – it is about reimagining the role of finance in an equitable, life-sustaining society and redirecting resources to the communities with a vision for creating that society.

Indeed, the call for divestment and reinvestment in community solutions now emanates loudly from a diversity of frontline coalitions, including the Visions 4 Black Lives policy platform, ReFund Oakland, Freedom Cities movement, Defund DAPL, Appalachian Transition initiative, and more.

Reinvesting in frontline leadership

So what could a finance system not reliant on the plunder of people and planet look like?

Frontline communities understand the challenges and threats better than anyone, and have developed cultures and ways of thinking that we all must learn from in the collective project of transitioning to a life-sustaining economy and society. As Patricia St. Onge, indigenous grandmother and co-leader of Idle No More SF Bay and Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, says: “Indigenous people are the antidotes to annihilation.”

On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest communities in the country, the Lakota-led Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation is developing a completely sustainable community development model. On the Standing Rock Reservation, the Standing Rock Sioux are now working to build community-owned solar and wind farms, while the Native-led Native Renewables is working with the Navajo Nation to transition from coal to solar. Across the Southeast, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund is raising money divested from Wall Street to finance worker-owned businesses in communities healing the centuries-old legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In Richmond, California – in the shadow of the Chevron Refinery, California’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions – Cooperation Richmond is similarly developing and financing worker cooperatives, like Rich City Rides, that enable community members to use their labor to heal rather than harm the community.

Ultimately, the fossil fuel and pipeline divestment movement must be about redistribution as well as resistance: redistribution of financial capital and the material resources needed to sustain life in an equitable economy, and of the political power and social platforms needed to elevate the voices, visions, and wisdom of frontline communities.

Want to join the # campaign and the broader divest/invest movement? Move your personal money into a local credit union or community bank (more resources here); join or start a local #DefundDAPL campaign (more resources here); follow and support indigenous-led organizations like Mazaska Talks, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Lakota People’s Law Project; learn more about other intersectional divest/invest efforts on the New Economy Coalition’s new “Move Your Money to the New Economy” page.

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Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

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Não ao Furo! Sim ao Futuro – No to oil drilling in Portugal!

Nearly 1000 people from 40 countries form a large-scale human message on Odeceixe beach to stop plans for off-shore oil drilling in Portugal. The event was part of “Defend the Sacred: Envision a Global Alternative” hosted by Tamera, joined by Standing Rock leaders and supported by environmental movements in Portugal. The aerial human image was designed by John Quigley of Spectral Q and filmed by Ludwig Schramm and team from Tamera.

As the oil companies push to drill for oil off this coast as early as April 2018, we came together to honor that water is life, water is sacred, life is sacred, and that we must defend the sacred. LaDonna Bravebull Allard, initiator of the Sacred Stone camp at Standing Rock said at the event, “I stood up for the water and the world stood with us, so I came here to stand with you. We have no choice, we must stand up for the water and we must stand up now!”

Combining political action with art and prayer, a ceremony for water and fire, we dedicated this act of sacred activism to a regenerative system change from a culture of exploitation to one of cooperation with all that lives. And that it’s our duty – our mandate – to call people to stand up, because people are ready for an alternative. And will run joyfully towards a more beautiful world, as the beach goers did on Odeceixe-Praia, as they heard and felt the call to complete the final pieces of the powerful message at the last minute.

The message featured the “Linha Vermelha” (“Red Line”) – a campaign in partnership with Climaximo and the Citizenship Academy. The red line represents the voices of those who repeatedly say “no” to the oil drilling here and in the world, and through weaving and knitting, aim to inform and mobilize the population, who otherwise would not be aware and sensitized to this crime.

The aerial art, designed by John Quigley, an American environmental advocate, known around the world for his aerial art activism. See John Quigley’s Biography (PDF) and an article about his work in the London Sunday Times (PDF).

The images are published under a under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial license. Acknowledgement: Ludwig Schramm / Karlito Delacasa / Simon du Vinage / Yuval Kovo / Spectral Q. The video is published under the same license – see credits.

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Originally published on localfutures.org. Chat transcript available for download as PDF here.

A 500-year-old economic and political system is dying. ‘Trump trauma’ is affecting people around the world, but the current climate (in every sense of the word) is not the result of one man alone. While we come to grips with that bigger picture, it’s worth asking: What gives us hope? What keeps our hearts beating, and gives us the spirit to keep the struggle for justice alive?

Moving from the personal, to the communal, to the political, this webinar explores the concept of ‘sacred activism’. Combining resistance with renewal, and structural critique with a celebration of life, sacred activism rejects the corporate message that we are greedy and aggressive by nature. It integrates politics, spirituality, and a deep-rooted sense of place into a holistic practice capable of bringing together indigenous peoples, traditional environmentalists, union organizers, New Age spiritualists, and ordinary citizens alike – as it did at Standing Rock, and as it continues to do in people’s movements around the world.

Delve into this exciting field with our speakers, Alnoor Ladha from The Rules and Helena Norberg-Hodge from Local Futures.

Resources to complement the webinar

Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock, by Alnoor Ladha. March 8th, 2017
Big Picture Activism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge. October 26th, 2014

PRESENTERS

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. Alnoor is a writer and speaker on new forms of activism, the structural causes of inequality, the link between climate change and capitalism, and the rise of the Global South as a powerful organizing force in the transition to a post-capitalist world. He is also writing a book about the intersection of mysticism and anarchism.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goi Peace Prize. She is author of Ancient Futures, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is the director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization, and a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.

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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Alnoor Ladha: Last week, on February 22, 2017, water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the primary camp of Standing Rock, were evicted by the Army Corps of Engineers in a military style takeover. A peaceful resistance that began with a sacred fire lit on April 1, 2016, ended in a blaze as some of the protectors, in a final act of defiance, set some of the camp’s structures on fire.

The millions of people around the world who have stood in solidarity and empathy with Standing Rock now stand in disbelief and grief, but the forced closure of the encampment is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonization against the First Nations. It is also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world.

Of course, the ongoing struggle will not go down in the flames at Oceti Sakowin. We should take this opportunity to remember the enduring lessons of this movement, and prepare ourselves for what is to come next.

1. There is a global convergence of movements

When I visited Standing Rock in October 2016, it struck me that this was the most diverse political gathering I’d ever seen. Over 300 North American tribes had came together for the first time in history. Standing alongside them were over 100 Indigenous communities from all over the globe. A contingent from the Sami people, the Indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, had traversed the Atlantic to show their support the day I arrived. They were joined by black bloc anarchists, New Age spiritualists, traditional environmentalists, union organizers and ordinary Americans who have never attended a protest.

The media has characterized Standing Rock as a one-off protest against a pipeline in North Dakota. But the reality is that the various movements from around the world including the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the landless people’s movement from India, the anti-austerity movement in Europe, the global Occupy movement, and the countless “awakenings” spreading across the African continent are uniting as expressions of the same impulse: a belief that the neoliberal capitalist system has failed the majority of humanity and a new world is emerging.

2. A more holistic activism is emerging

With its sacred fire, daily prayers and water ceremonies, Standing Rock has helped to reanimate the sacred aspect of activism. We are seeing a shift from resistance to resistance and renewal simultaneously. Progressive movements which once internalized the Neitzchean dictum that “God is dead” are now evolving their positions. As the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey states: “As Capital triumphs over the Social as against all spiritualities, spirituality itself finds itself realigned with revolution^.”There is a shift to embracing a more holistic activism that transcends traditional Cartesian duality and calls upon greater forces. Cedric Goodhouse, an elder at Standing Rock put it simply, saying: “We are governed by prayer.”

The particular ways in which Standing Rock embodied non-violent direct action has given many activists a new faith in the possibility of a more sacred activism. I stood with dozens of water protectors when they prayed on water in front of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) engineers while they were laying down oil pipeline. The very act of seeing Indigenous elders praying on water said more about the implications of an extractive pipeline than any linear argument. They dropped their tools not only because they wanted to avoid confrontation, but because somehow they understood they were on the wrong side of the moral calculus.

The author Charles Eisenstein reminds us of a powerful insight about sacred activism that has been embodied in Standing Rock: “We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate ‘the deplorables.’ We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: ‘Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.’ If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.”

3. Occupation of space is a critical tactic

Even before Occupy there has been a renaissance in the political understanding of the value of place and space. The battlegrounds between the corporate/state nexus and people’s movements are physical realms: the places where resources are being extracted, water is being polluted and capitalist interests are expanding through what Marxist geographer, David Harvey, calls “accumulation by dispossession.”

The occupation of space creates a physical spectacle that forces the corporate media to tell the stories it would otherwise like to ignore. It creates networks of solidarity and deep relationships that span beyond the time and space of the occupation. It creates inter-generational transfers-of-knowledge, both politically and spiritually. It weaves the connective tissue for the continued resistance against corporate (and other imperialist) power.

Standing Rock will be remembered by the thousands of activists who braved blizzards to sleep in tipis, who cooked food together in the communal kitchens, and celebrated in song and ceremony with tribal elders around the sacred fire. As the activist Reverend Billy Talen recently stated: “Zuccotti Park and the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Ferguson police department and the meadow near the Sacred Stone… these three places are lived in. Here is where activists cared for each other and shared food, clothing and medicine. The force that upsets entrenched power the most is this compassionate living, this community in plain sight.”

4. We are Nature protecting itself

Part of the on-going colonial legacy of North America is a battle between the mute materialism of capitalism that seeks to dominate nature and the symbiotic approach of Indigenous thought that sees Nature as alive, and sees human beings as playing a central role in the evolution and stewardship of the broader whole. It is this very worldview that rationalists derisively call “animist” and that continues to confound the utility maximization ideals of modern thought.

Indigenous lands are increasingly going to be a battleground not only for resource extraction, but ideology itself. Although Indigenous peoples represent about 4% of the world’s population they live on and protect 22% of the Earth’s surface. Critically, the land inhabited by Indigenous peoples holds the remaining 80% of the planet’s biodiversity.

It is no coincidence that ETP moved away from its early proposal to have the DAPL project cross the Missouri river just north of Bismarck, a primarily white city, to the Standing Rock area inhabited by the Sioux tribe.

During COP 21 in Paris, Indigenous youth groups carried banners that read: “We are Nature protecting itself.” The idea that we are not protestors, but protectors of the sacred is a central theme that resonates throughout the world.

In a powerful article on the Sacred Stone blog, the camp’s founder Ladonna Bravebull Allard said: “This movement is not just about a pipeline. We are not fighting for a reroute, or a better process in the white man’s courts. We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body. We want healing. We want clean water. We want to determine our own future.”

These ideals are not just Indigenous ideals; they are ideals linked with our very survival as a species. In a world of catastrophic climate change, protecting the sacred must be the mantra of all activists and concerned citizens.

5. There is a common antagonist

Although the various social movements around the world are portrayed as separate incidents that are particular to their local context, there is a growing awareness among movements themselves that we are uniting against the same antagonist: the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism.

Whether one is fighting for land rights in India or tax justice in Kenya or to stop a pipeline in the US, the ‘enemy’ is the same: a cannibalistic global economy that requires perpetual extraction, violence, oppression, in the service of GDP growth, which in turn, benefits a tiny elite at the expense of the world’s majority.

There is a Algonquin word, wetiko, that refers to a cannibalistic spirit that consumes the heart of man. It was a common term used when the First Nations of North America initially interacted with the Western European colonialists. The spirit of wetiko, like many memetic thought-forms, has mutated and evolved, and has now become the animating force of the global capitalist system. We are not just fighting a pipeline; we are fighting the wetiko spirit that has taken hold of our planet like invisible architecture.

What Standing Rock achieved so beautifully was to provide this broader context, to ladder up a local struggle for clean water to the struggle against the forces of wetiko itself. Wetikois inherently anti-life. And what we are all fighting for is a new system that recognizes our interdependence with the Earth and with each other, and that allows our highest selves to flourish.

The sacred fire at Standing Rock may now be smoldering but it’s reverberations are only beginning to be felt. As Julian Brave NoiseCat poignantly states in his reflections on the impact of this historical movement: “They have lit a fire on the prairie in the heart of America as a symbol of their resistance, a movement that stands for something that is undoubtedly right: water that sustains life, and land that gave birth to people.”

This is the enduring power of Standing Rock. It has created inextinguishable hope, activated our historical memory and created new forms of power by the profound act of starting a global movement from a single sacred fire. The fires of Standing Rock are illuminating the transition that lies ahead and the new society that is emerging from its ashes.

Alnoor Ladha is the Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, writers, and researchers dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and climate change. He is also a board member of Greenpeace International USA.

Cross-posted from Common Dreams

Photo by Dark Sevier

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