Shoshone Grandmothers Plan Resistance Day on Proposed Mine Site

Contacts:
Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone grandmother, 775-468-0230
Dan Randolph, Great Basin Resource Watch, 775-722-4056
Julie Cavanaugh-Bill, Western Shoshone Defense Project, 775-744-2565 or wsdp@igc.org

Restraining Order Requested – Shoshone Grandmothers Plan Resistance Day on Proposed Mine Site

Photo: The late Mary Dann with sister Carrie Dann/WSDP

From Shoshone Grandmothers

CRESCENT VALLEY, Newe Sogobi ( Nevada). As the holidays approach and the world watches President-elect Obama and the bailouts; back in Nevada, home state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it’s business as usual. Late yesterday, attorneys for several Western Shoshone tribes and non-profit indigenous and environmental organizations filed a request in the federal District Court in Reno, NV seeking a restraining order against the construction of one of the country’s largest open pit gold mines on the flank of spiritual Mt. Tenabo. The mine company has already begun demolition of the pinyon forest with heavy machinery on the site ripping out trees at a reported rate of 30 acres per day. As they await a Court hearing and feeling compelled to take immediate action, tomorrow, a group of Shoshone grandmothers will travel to the proposed mine site to conduct a day of Resistance to the destruction of the area and the approval of the mine by the United States. Mt. Tenabo is a well-known home to local Shoshone creation stories, spirit life, medicinal, food and ceremonial plants and rocks and continues to be used to this day by Shoshone for spiritual ceremonies and cultural practices. Over the years, tens of thousands of individuals and organizations from across the United States and around the world have joined with the Shoshone and voiced their opposition to this mine –in fact, the mine is being referred to as the “most opposed mine in the world”.

“We want them off this mountain, this is a spiritual genocide what’s going on; destroying our mountain is destroying our beliefs. Removing water is death to the mountains. No way. We will take whatever action we need to – we’re going through the U.S. courts and we will stand on this Mountain in support of her and call on those people around the world to stand with us in solidarity.” Stated Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone Grandmother, Executive Director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (the alternate to the Nobel Peace Prize).

Barrick Gold Corporation, the world’s largest gold mining company, headquartered in Canada, plans to construct and operate the mine, known as the Cortez Hills Expansion Project. The area is located entirely within the territory of the Western Shoshone Nation, recognized in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The Mine would blast and excavate a new massive open pit on Mount Tenabo over 900 acres in size, with a depth of over 2,000 feet. It would include several new waste disposal and processing facilities (including a cyanide heap-leaching facility), consisting of approximately 1,577 million tons of waste rock, 53 million tons of tailings material, and 112 million tons of spent heap leach material. The Mine would include an extensive groundwater pumping system to dewater Mount Tenabo and associated water pipelines that will transport the pumped water away from Mount Tenabo. In total, the mine would permanently destroy approximately 6,800 acres land on and around Mount Tenabo, over 90% of which is classified as federal “public” land.

In 2002 and 2003 the BLM conducted a series of armed seizures in the same area, of the Dann family’s cattle and horses, claiming the Danns were “trespassing” on public lands. The Danns, along with other Western Shoshone, have challenged the U.S. claims to their ancestral and treaty lands as recognized by the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, which recognized Western Shoshone rights in much of Nevada. These legal battles went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on to International Fora. In March 2006 the Western Shoshone received a ruling from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, CERD, a treaty body set up by the United Nations and ratified by the United States in 1993.

The Decision issued by CERD, and reconfirmed this year, urges the United States to immediately freeze, desist and stop any further actions against the Western Shoshone peoples, including legislative efforts to privatize their land. CERD ordered the United States to stop immediately and initiate dialogue with the Western Shoshone. The Decision specifically mentioned Mt. Tenabo and the destruction of Western Shoshone lands by mining corporations.

“In the 1800’s, the U.S. sent in the Calvary to remove the Indians and to kill off our sources of food, such as the Buffalo. Now here they are, just days before Thanksgiving in 2008, destroying our Mountain of life and the pinyon trees which are our food. This is happening today and it’s outrageous.” Says Joyce McDade, Western Shoshone grandmother.

Barbara Ridley, another Western Shoshone grandmother participating in the resistance states: Who’s Thanksgiving is this anyway? What have we got to celebrate? There’s no Thanksgiving for our people – they tell us we don’t have our land but we still use it for our foods, plants and ceremonies. This mountain is very important to us and people should respect our request to leave it alone.”

The plaintiffs are being represented in court by Roger Flynn of the non-profit legal firm, the Western Mining Action Project, which specializes in mining law. The Grandmothers’ Resistance Day will take place of the South Flank of Mt. Tenabo at the proposed mine site beginning at approximately 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, November 26th.

For more information on the Western Shoshone land rights issues, Cortez Hills Project, Mount Tenabo, and the legal challenge go to www.gbrw.org and www.wsdp.org.

Protesting US torture in Fort Huachuca

Protesting US torture training at Fort Huachuca Army Intelligence Center in Arizona, in November 2008. Photo credit and more information: http://www.tortureontrial.org/

Drum song at the AIM West Reunion

TOP PHOTO: At the AIM West 40 year reunion, youths from DQ University sang the AIM song on Monday. Listen live at http://www.earthcycles.net/ and in San Francisco on 104.1 FM this week. The singers included Shaleen and Ed, both Long Walkers on the northern route in 2008. Bottom Photo: DQ activist with Tony Gonzales and Mike Flores listening to drum song. Photos Brenda Norrell

Open Letter from Leonard Peltier to Barack Obama

Open Letter From Leonard Peltier to Barack Obama

From Leonard Peltier

I have watched with keen interest and renewed hope as your campaign has
mobilized millions of Americans behind your message of changing a
political system that serves a small economic elite at the expense of the
peoples of the United States and the world. Your election as president of
the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than
human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race
relations in the United States.

Yet symbolism alone will not bring about change. Our young people, black
and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling,
underfunded schools, and discrimination in employment and housing. I
sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to
struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent
statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers
who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted
of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the
law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it
will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes
functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution.

As I can testify from experience, the legal institutions of this nation
are far from racial and political neutrality. When judges align with the
repressive actions and policies of the executive branch, injustice is
rationalized and cloaked in judicial platitudes. As you may know, I have
now served more than three decades of my life as a political prisoner of
the federal government for a crime I did not commit. I have served more
time than the maximum sentence under the guidelines under which I was
sentenced, yet my parole is continually denied (on the rare occasions when
I am afforded a hearing) because I refuse to falsely confess. Amnesty
International, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet,
my Guatemalan sister Rigoberta Menchu, and many of your friends and
supporters have recognized me as a political prisoner and called for my
immediate release. Millions of people around the world view me as a symbol
of injustice against the indigenous peoples of this land, and I have no
doubt that I will go down in history as one of a long line of victims of
U.S. government repression, along with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket
Square martyrs, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and others targeted by for
their political beliefs. But neither I nor my people can afford to wait
for history to rectify the crimes of the past.

As a member of the American Indian Movement, I came to the Pine Ridge
Oglala reservation to defend the traditional people there from human
rights violations carried out by tribal police and goon squads backed by
the FBI and the highest offices of the federal government. Our symbolic
occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 inspired Indians across the Americas to
struggle for their freedom and treaty rights, but it was also met by a
fierce federal siege and a wave of violent repression on Pine Ridge. In
1974, AIM leader Russell Means campaigned for tribal chairman while being
tried by the federal government for his role at Wounded Knee. Although
Means was barred from the reservation by decree of the U.S.-client regime
of Richard Wilson, he won the popular vote, only to be denied office by
extensive vote fraud and control of the electoral mechanisms. Wilson's
goons proceeded to shoot up pro-Means villages such as Wanblee and
terrorize traditional supporters throughout the reservation, killing at
least 60 people between 1973 and 1975.

It is long past time for a congressional investigation to examine the
degree of federal complicity in the violent counterinsurgency that
followed the occupation of Wounded Knee. The tragic shootout that led to
the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native man also led not only to my
false conviction, but also the termination of the Church Committee, which
was investigating abuses by federal intelligence and law enforcement
agents, before it could hold hearings on FBI infiltration of AIM. Despite
decades of attempts by my attorneys to obtain government documents related
to my case, the FBI continues to withhold thousands of documents that
might tend to exonerate me or reveal compromising evidence of judicial
collusion with the prosecution.

I truly believe the truth will set me free, but it will also signify a
symbolic break from America's undeclared war on indigenous peoples. I hope
and pray that you possess the courage and integrity to seek out the truth
and the wisdom to recognize the inherent right of all peoples to
self-determination, as acknowledged by the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. While your statements on federal Indian
policy sound promising, your vision of "one America" has an ominous ring
for Native peoples struggling to define their own national visions. If
freed from colonial constraints and external intervention, indigenous
nations might well serve as functioning models of the freedom and
democracy to which the United States aspires.

Yours in the struggle.

Until freedom is won,

Leonard Peltier
# 89637-132
U.S.P. Lewisburg,
P.O. Box 1000,
Lewisburg, PA USA 17837