Our Mother Earth

You bind my arms behind me.
You force me to watch as you slash my mother to pieces.
Her face grows ashen as the crimson river of life flows from her breast.

She grows weak and emancipated as you feast upon her bounty.
You spread her and rape her.
You pillage her womb and leave her barren and sterile.
You soil and pollute her as you desecrate her with your waste.

Her breath reeks fetid and sour.
You violate her in a million untold ways.
All this you do in the name of civilization.
We are brothers and you call me "savage."

There is a kindred spirit we Native Americans feel to the land, which was reflected most germanely by the National Indian Youth Conference in their 1961 policy statement;

“The protection of our land and water and other natural resources are of utmost importance to us. Our culture not only exists in time but in space as well. If we loose our land we are adrift like a leaf on a lake, which will float aimlessly and then dissolve and disappear. Our land is more than the ground on which we stand and sleep, and in which we bury our dead. The land is our spiritual mother whom we can no easier sell than our physical mother. We are products of the poverty, despair, and discrimination pushed on our people from the outside. We are the products of chaos. Chaos in our tribes. Chaos in our personal lives. We are also products of a rich and ancient culture which supersedes and makes bearable any oppression we are forced to bear. We believe that one's basic identity should be with his tribe. We believe in tribalism, we believe that tribalism is what has caused us to endure.” [1]

W we are forced to watch as mankind consumes all that mother earth has to offer. This is a view that is not taken by every Native American, as even some Native Americans participate in this squander as they assimilate into mainstream society. It becomes the old ways (respect for nature, tradition, and harmony with the land), verses the new ways (greed, money, and possessions).

There are those of us who still strive to protect the land. One example of an environmental crusader is Curly Bear Wagner, a Blackfeet Indian, and the cultural coordinator of the Blackfeet People. Curly Bear has taken on as one of his primary responsibilities, the preservation the Sweetgrass Hills of Montana, including their protection from gold mining. The historical and cultural significance of this area is of tremendous importance to the Blackfeet people, however, the environmental impact gold mining creates can only be described as cataclysmic.

Curly Bear says;

“Modern gold mining, unlike the more romantic business of earlier times , involves stripping the ore, pulverizing it, piling it onto a leach pad, and infusing it with a cyanide solution to release the gold. Not only does the cyanide threaten the water, but also crushing the ore releases such heavy metals as lead, mercury, and arsenic--all poisonous. [2]

No matter how we romanticize the old west gold mining era, the fact is that the land is poisoned. Daily we become more aware of the long term ramifications our exploitation has created;

“Sutter Creek--High levels of arsenic plague not just an Amador County subdivision built on mine tailings but the surrounding neighborhood as well . . . Mesa Del Oro show arsenic levels at 1,066 parts per million . . .other parts of the county naturally contain 14 parts per million . . .” [3]

Sutter Creek is a quaint, little town nestled in the heart of California's Gold Country. During the gold rush era of 1849, placer deposits were exceedingly rich, but played out rapidly, this brought about the use of strip (hydraulic) mining, dredging, sluicing, and hardrock (quartz) mining. Hardrock mining is what we usually think of gold mining and requires a process known as "amalgamation", a complicated process utilizing mercury to trap the gold. Many tons of gold-bearing quartz ore was crushed, and much of this was done using Indian labor, the visible traces being tailings scattered through out the hillsides. "Through out the years, $36 million in gold was extracted from the Eureka Mine alone." [4] Now, in 1994, over 140 years later, parents are being told to keep children and pets indoors as much as possible, to shut windows on windy days, and not to eat fruits or vegetables grown in the soil. How does a parent explain this to their small child who wants to play outside?

The physical scars that gold mining leaves upon the land have not healed in the last 140 years either, as evidenced at the Malakoff Diggings State Historic Park, California, where a 7000 foot long 3000 foot wide, 300 foot deep pit [5], dissects the land in a memorial tribute to man's eternal quest for gold. The destruction from gold mining has not been limited to the United States. As stated in a recent P.B.S. Nova presentation, "The Tribe That Time Forgot", (Brazil, South America), "Prospectors openly contaminate the river with mercury while dredging for gold." This same program goes on to say; "The rapids were dynamited in an effort to move dredging barges upstream. They failed." In this author's opinion, that was the most positive statement made about the preservation of the South American waterways. The search for gold is not the only way mankind has destroyed the environment. The demand for rubber enslaved the South American aboriginal people, and deforestation of the Brazilian rain forrest claims 85,000 tons of Brazilian Mahogany every year mostly for use in the United States and Great Britain. [6]

Civilization seems to bring about destruction. Nestled between the picturesque White Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, south of Lone Pine, California, Owens Lake stands as a monument to man's eternal quest to quench his thirst. Now a dry, inhospitable, infertile scar on the Owens Valley, Owens Lake, was, as late as 1916, larger than Lake Tahoe. Ferries were required to cross it's vastness. In 1916, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, began diverting water from the Owens Valley in an effort to irrigate the desert we now know as the Los Angeles Basin. By 1928, Owens Lake was dry. [7] The Mono Lake Committee has spent over twenty years in litigation attempting to prevent this same destruction from occurring at Mono Lake, Lee Vining, California.

In 1987, Senator Alan Cranston and several key executives from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in an effort to repudiate any environmental impact water diversion has had on the land, attempted to make a trip to Lee Vining. Ironically, it was a very windy day. Highway 395, the main artery north through eastern California was closed due to the lack of visibility resulting from dust clouds of alkali, blowing across the highway. [8]

John Mure stated that the Hetch Hetchey Valley was more beautiful than Yosemite Valley, yet we will never again feast upon it's beauty, which now lies beneath 300 feet of water. The Hetch Hetchey Dam was built in 1913, to satisfy the needs for water in San Francisco.

We developed and tested the Nuclear Bomb at White Sands, New Mexico. We have done underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. We tested the effects of radiation on human beings.

Light pollution interferes with the Palomar Observatory, rendering it almost useless on most nights. We lit up a city in the middle of the desert whose light pollution, now, (particularly the lasers) interferes with incoming airplanes landing at the airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. Because of our efforts to power every conceivable machine man can create, we have added to the pollution through nuclear accidents, which in 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, in Harrisburg, PA, and in 1986, at the Chernoble Power Plant at Chernoble, Russia, in the United Soviet Socialists Republic, leaked radiation into the atmosphere. Chernoble remains an uninhabitable hot spot. These two nuclear accidents were publicized due to their magnitude, and yet how many "minor" nuclear spills occur which go unreported?

Just look around you. We have become a disposable society. The air is polluted. Land fills are full of debris and disposable diapers, bottles, cans, and a profusion of untold waste. Toxic waste seeps into our water (Love Canal, New York). Radiation contaminates our soil. Asbestos and lead permeate our homes and offices. The ozone layer grows thin exposing a large hole. Our streets are filled with not only human waste, but the wasted bodies and lives of human beings, who have been cast aside because they are no longer of use to society. Our bodies decay with cancer. Yet our society decays at an even more accelerated rate as we channel our energies toward greed and away from our life giving mother. Where will it all end?, with the eradication of mankind . . .

From the soil we are born. She is our mother, whose breath gives us life and whose bounty gives us sustenance. We nurture and care for her during the days we walk upon her, and to her loving embrace we return when our time is done. This is the way of the Native American.

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