BISMARCK, N.D. – It's been three years since Native American communities attempted to block an oil pipeline in the Standing Rock protests.
After a spill from Keystone XL in North Dakota and a proposal to expand the Dakota Access Pipeline, those protests continue to echo.
Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, says the four tribes of the Great Sioux Nation are standing together to oppose pipeline development.
But that won't be easy. Iron Eyes says tribal members know from experience what happens when people try to stand in the way. Take the Standing Rock protests.
"Eight-hundred-fifty people went to jail over it,” he points out. “I was facing six years in prison over it. The president of this Oglala Sioux Nation was facing a year in jail over it.
“Sophia Wilansky lost her arm over it. And a couple others lost their eyeballs over it. So, no small matter to us. We're preparing to fight again."
Last month, the Keystone XL Pipeline leaked about 383,000 gallons of oil into the ground in northeast North Dakota. Last week, it was discovered that the leak affected about 4.9 acres of land – 10 times larger than what was first reported.
North Dakota officials also are considering a proposal from Energy Transfer Partners to double the capacity of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Iron Eyes and other tribal leaders in the region are pushing back hard on this proposal.
Pointing to the Keystone as an example, Iron Eyes maintains leaking is natural part of the process for pipelines. He says the legal system needs to adapt to properly punish companies when a pipeline leaks.
"How can these guys destroy our children's very lives?” he questions. “And they're paying maybe a fine, but they're not facing any jail time or public humiliation and shame. Those things work and we have to do them. It's our civic duty."
U.S. House Democrats have called for an investigation into TC Energy's management of the Keystone Pipeline.
Iron Eyes knows it's an uphill battle to take on the oil industry. He says supporters in the fight will have to stand strong on all fronts.
"Sometimes it means putting ourselves in harm's way in order to defend the sacred and the sources of our livelihoods, the real, true sources of any real economic value, which is, you know, our water and our natural ecosystems," he states.
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By Frank Hopper for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for the Yes! Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
This month marks four years since Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old African American man, was killed by Tacoma police. Despite the all-too-familiar injustice of the killing, something happened in the aftermath that had never before occurred in Washington state: The police who killed him were put on trial for murder.
Although the officers were found not guilty, the trial itself would not have happened at all if not for the Puyallup tribe and their years-long struggle to change the law that protected police in Washington from being prosecuted for killing suspects in the line of duty.
The Puyallup tribe of Washington has always been a protector of Native rights, especially during the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They fought back when the state of Washington tried to take away their treaty-protected fishing rights during the fishing wars of the 1970s.
They also fought back against federal termination and relocation policies with the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz and the 1970 takeover of Seattle's Fort Lawton. They fought alongside the Oglala Lakota against the federal support of a corrupt puppet tribal government at the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee.
They never backed down at these and many other direct actions. So when one of their own, Puyallup tribal member Jacqueline Salyers, was brutally and senselessly gunned down by Tacoma police in 2016, they consulted with the elders who had organized and led many of the tribe's early direct actions.
The result was the passage of the nation's first police accountability bill, Washington state's Initiative 940, which removed the immunity the police once had that historically allowed them to murder citizens with impunity.
Jackie's Murder
On Jan. 3, 2016, Puyallup tribal member Lisa Earl got a call from a Tacoma police detective about her daughter, Jacqueline Salyers, who went by Jackie. Earl was at the Puyallup tribe's Little Wild Wolves Youth Center where she worked as a youth coordinator.
"He asked if I knew the whereabouts of my daughter," Earl recalls, "because she was known to be with Kenneth Wright, who had a warrant out for his arrest and they needed to get ahold of him."
Earl explained to the detective that she and her family were also looking for Salyers. Kenneth Wright, Salyers' abusive boyfriend, had been keeping her away from her family, according to Earl. He had even threatened Earl's life, telling Salyers if her mother didn't stop bothering him, he would kill her.
"I was afraid for my life. I told the detective, 'I want you to catch him!'" Earl explains. "'I want my daughter back! I want her to come home!'"
A few weeks later, on January 28, Salyers was shot four times by Officer Scott Campbell. He said she had tried to run him over while he and another officer were attempting to arrest her boyfriend. She died a few minutes later, just after midnight on January 29.
Later that day, James Rideout, Salyers' uncle and Earl's brother, heard about the shooting and found his sister at the medical examiner's office, hysterical. He drove to the crime scene in East Tacoma and found the entire area cordoned off. He couldn't get anywhere near where the shooting happened. A local news reporter offhandedly told him he thought the shooting was going to be deemed justified.
"Why would you say that?" Rideout remembers saying. "They haven't even investigated this case!"
The reporter knew the facts weren't important; police were protected from prosecution.
The Alleged Cover-Up
According to a 2021 story in the Tacoma News Tribune, official police reports state an informant had told Officer Campbell of Wright's whereabouts. Campbell and another officer located Wright's vehicle and pulled up in front of it. Salyers and Wright were inside. After seeing Wright, who was considered armed and dangerous, they drew their weapons and approached the vehicle, screaming at Wright to put his hands in the air.
Salyers, who was in the driver's seat, was startled, turned the ignition on, and began driving away. Campbell relates he felt sure Salyers was trying to run him over, although she was only "crawling" according to Wright.
Campbell fired seven rounds at Salyers. She was hit four times, two bullets penetrating her abdomen and head.
Right from the beginning, Rideout could tell the official story didn't add up. A bullet hole was present in the driver's door, indicating Campbell was not in front of the car when he fired.
According to an official investigation by Tacoma police, after the shooting Wright grabbed a rifle, crawled over Salyers' body, got out the driver's side door, and ran off. Campbell and his partner, Officer Aaron Joseph, chased Wright, but apparently lost him and broke off pursuit, supposedly afraid Wright would fire at them from a hidden position.
Mysteriously, a police surveillance camera mounted in the area that should have captured the entire event "malfunctioned" according to police reports.
The Community Response
Salyers had been active in the Puyallup tribe. Many had grown up with her and remembered her loving personality and concern for others.
Adding to the tragedy, the medical examiner determined she was pregnant at the time of the shooting. Earl and her family not only lost a beloved daughter, they also lost a new member of the next generation.
"You need to do something," Rideout remembers telling the tribal council. "And they did. They responded."
Council members Sylvia Miller and Tim Reynon, along with tribal elder Ramona Bennett and other influential members of the community, began meeting weekly at the Little Wild Wolves Youth Center to plan how the tribe would respond.
The elders had experience with activism going back to the 1960s. Over the years they had fought with police over many issues, including fishing and land rights. They had been beaten, tear-gassed, and incarcerated. They knew what they were facing, and they were not afraid.
Bennett, now 85, was a veteran of many battles, standoffs, and occupations, and she suspected a possible cover-up in Salyers' case, after the police realized what they'd done.
"'Now look what you did! You killed that stupid Indian girl!' That's what Ramona Bennett said [the police] would say," Earl recalls.
The Birth of Initiative 940
Bennett knew from experience that change would only come about through publicity, cooperation with other groups, and community support. So she recommended they stage a march. On March 16, 2016, Earl led a procession of nearly 300 people from the Puyallup tribe's administration building to the federal courthouse in downtown Tacoma.
To her surprise, many other families of police shooting victims joined them in support.
"We didn't have any clue until Jackie was killed that there were so many others out there going through the same thing as we were," Earl remembers.
Over time, attendance at the weekly community meetings at the tribe's youth center grew. Families of other police murder victims shared their stories and discussed what they could do to address the problem.
One supporter was Rick Williams, the older brother of John T. Williams, who had been shot by Seattle police officer Ian Birk on Aug. 30, 2010. According to Birk, Williams, 50, was carrying an open pocket knife and refused to drop it. Williams was a seventh-generation master carver of the Ditidaht tribe who was carving a board as he walked down the street.
Dashcam footage of the incident clearly indicated that after Birk exited his patrol car, he almost immediately fired at the nearly blind and partially deaf Williams.
King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg announced he could not charge Birk with murder due to a clause in state law, enacted in 1986 during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, that said unless it can be proven a police officer acted with evil intent or malice, they cannot be prosecuted for killing suspects. Since malice is a mental state, it is nearly impossible to prove its presence in a court of law, giving police in Washington nearly complete immunity to kill suspects.
Rick Williams had since been working to change the law. He campaigned and collected signatures for Washington state Initiative 873, known as the John T. Williams Bill. It was written by police reform advocate Lisa Hayes after the unjustified Seattle police shooting of Che Taylor in February 2016.
The initiative failed to get enough signatures to be put on the ballot but later became the template the families at the Puyallup community meetings used to draft Initiative 940.
Along with the families of many other police shooting victims and the financial support of every federally recognized tribe in Washington state, the Puyallup tribe successfully gathered 360,000 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot. And in 2018 Washington voters passed Initiative 940 into law.
How the New Law Affected the Police Killing of Manuel Ellis
Manuel Ellis died in 2020 while Tacoma police held him face down on the ground, put a bag over his head, and kneeled on his neck, causing him to die of hypoxia, or lack of breath, just as in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. If his death had happened before the passage of Initiative 940, the three officers responsible for his death, Matthew Collins, Christopher Burbank, and Timothy Rankine, would never have been charged with a crime or put on trial.
Due to the new law, however, Collins and Burbank were charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter and Rankine was charged with manslaughter.
All three officers were acquitted on Dec. 21, 2023, by a mostly white jury, and the city of Tacoma paid them $500,000 each to resign. This outcome is considered "perverse" by Ellis' family and supporters.
Chester Earl, Salyers' cousin, feels the issue of white privilege played a major role in the verdict. He thinks the white jurors had no experience dealing with police racism and violence. He feels they probably believe the police are always right.
"You got to remember, all's we been able to do with 940 is give the prosecutors the opportunity to charge and convict and take them to court. We can't make prosecutors argue it in a certain way," he explains.
The fight for true police reform will likely take years and will require a major shift in how the public feels about the role of law enforcement in our society. Salyers' tragic murder, however, caused a major step in that direction, according to her uncle, James Rideout.
"What makes me most proud," he says, "is she brought the best out in me to do something that has never been done in the history of the United States, and that's to change this law for the protection of our future generations. And I thank her, and it'll be a lifetime before I can tell her, 'You changed our entire tribe and community forever, and you will always, always be remembered. We will never forget you. Your life mattered.'"
Frank Hopper wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.
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By Jay Gabler for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
When it comes to good nutrition, Sharon Day believes in starting early.
“Our goal is to begin our babies with an Indigenous diet,” Day explained. Traditionally, “we had corn, beans, and squash. Those were our foods, along with wild rice, and if we ate meat, it was very lean, low cholesterol.”
That’s very different from “the foods they began to feed us,” said Day, referencing European colonizers. “The commodity foods, white flour, white sugar, these foods high in cholesterol.”
The Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF), a Minneapolis organization Day co-founded in 1987, is now making an effort to hit reset on that unhealthy diet. The first jars of Indigi-Baby food were released in 2023, providing families with a wholesome and sustainable alternative to commercial products.
The IPTF has been developing its baby food for nearly a decade, said Mike Neumann, the program’s agroecology coordinator. There was extensive testing of the recipes, which were created by Lori Watso — a chef and nurse from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota Community. That was followed by a national search for a partner to help produce and package the foods, as well as a struggle with pandemic-era supply chain delays.
“It’s much more complicated than we imagined in the beginning,” said Day. Indigi-Baby bucks the status quo for 21st century baby food: the products need to meet not only government regulations but also the IPTF’s own high standards for food quality and back-to-basics packaging.
“Most of the baby food on the market these days comes from these little plastic pouches,” said Day. “We didn’t want to do that, so ours is actually canned in jars — and so we have to get licensed for the process.”
The food’s integrity begins at the source. Ingredients are grown locally, using heirloom seeds and methods that forgo the extractive approach of industrial agriculture. “The strategies we use,” said Neumann, “are geared towards improving soil health, helping to attract pollinators, bird and other life.”
“We don’t use any herbicides, any pesticides, none of that,” said Day.
“There’s a sweet potato and Hopi black bean,” said Day, grabbing different Indigi-Baby jars to list the varieties. “Gete okosomin and butternut squash. Wild rice and apple juice; a little bit of lime juice and maple syrup. Sweet potato and rutabaga, and in this one there’s also super tender rutabaga apples and a little bit of lime juice.”
The first batch of Indigi-Baby food was produced in association with North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, an organization founded by famed Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. IPTF is currently exploring more options for partners to produce future batches.
In distributing the first jars of Indigi-Baby, IPTF prioritized community health clinics and food shelves, in Minnesota and elsewhere. “Our goal is to get it to as many Native babies [as possible],” said Day.
“The goal,” she elaborated, “is when young mothers give birth, they would nurse their babies. And then from the nursing, give them this baby food, which doesn’t have any of the sugar, fats, or salts, or flour — the [ingredients] that are killing us.”
Neumann said grocers are already asking when they can stock Indigi-Baby products, which may start appearing on regular store shelves as the project’s capacity increases.
Nationally, there’s at least one other brand of baby food informed by a similar philosophy: Bidii Baby Foods, a New Mexico company based in the Navajo Nation. According to its website, Bidii Baby Foods wants to challenge the assumption “that traditional foods are reserved for times of ceremony or celebration (mainly because they are expensive and hard to come by).”
That accords with a larger goal of increasing access to traditional foods, for the health of the community and of the earth. The crops that become Indigi-Baby food have proved more resilient to climate shocks, and because more carbon is stored in the soil compared to at heavily-tilled conventional farms, said Neumann, “it’s also helping in a very small way to reverse climate change.”
Regarding IPTF’s more crop-diverse, less invasive farming practices, said Neumann, “We know it works in other places, and we’re seeing it here as well. It’s something that we’re hoping to do more to promote as part of Indigi-Baby foods: these Indigenous-based, regenerative agroecology methods.”
And the babies like it, too, said Day. “So far, so good,” was how she described families’ reactions to the first shipment of Indigi-Baby. During the testing process, Day couldn’t resist trying a spoonful or two herself.
“It tasted pretty good to me,” said Day. “I think you could take the same ingredients and make smoothies with them. That’s how good they are — and they’re very healthy.”
Jay Gabler wrote this story for Arts Midwest.
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