An update on the Gathering of Mother Earth Protectors at Queens Park in Toronto by Judy Rebick (via their blog):

Today was the second day of the Gathering of Mother Earth Protectors. After a successful rally of more than 1,000 people yesterday, today settled down to constant presence of the three communities and supporters camping at Queen’s Park. It’s really something to see three tepees and big tents on the lawns of Queen’s Park. Drop by and join in

The highlights today were a Chief’s press conference led off by AFN Chief Phil Fontaine. The chief of Grassy Narrows flew down for it and Donny Morris, Sam McKay and Jack Lapointe all spoke. Later in a moving moment 3 chiefs from Northern Manitoba who had flown in said how inspired they were by the KI 6 and presented a substantial contribution from their communities.

Then the leader of the amazing Grassy Walk, Chrissy Swain spoke about their walk and several youth including one from Six Nations who had been on the walk spoke. There were workshops too including one on Tyendinaga and Barriere Lake.

Tomorrow the highlight is the Ardoch KI appeal. There will be a march from Queen’s Park to Osgoode Hall at 10 am. Hope to see you there

Weyerhaeuser, by way of its iLevel brand, has been broadcasting the construction of a new house in Reedley, CA live over the Web.

Quick background: In northwestern Ontario’s stretch of boreal forest, Weyerhaeuser owns and operates a major mill which obtains wood from the traditional territory of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. The community has not consented to logging on their territory and has backed a moratorium but lacks the ability to enforce it.

So we sent two our finest out to Weyerhaeuser’s construction site to use a bit of their own technology against them. Annie and Adrian found the site yesterday and deployed a large banner reading “Wake up Weyerhaeuser; American Dream Home, Native Nightmare” directly in front of the company’s auotmated webcam.

Ten minutes later, the image made it to Weyerhaeuser’s site.

But why stop there?

Back at home base, we noticed a great feature of the site, an archive:

But it’s password protected:

Luckily, our folks are a bit smarter than their folks:

More »

Update: better quality video of the event is here.

Update: pictures from the event are here.

This morning, RAN activists gave Weyerhaeuser shareholders an idea of what the company is really about (not the greenwashing lies it posts on its website). About 20 of us descended on the company’s annual shareholder meeting with a 20-foot banner equating the “American Dream” (of big, new homes) with a “Native Nightmare” of flattened forests and eviscerated ecosystems. Three activists locked themselves to the HQ’s front entrance and declared that they wouldn’t leave until Weyerhaeuser got out of Grassy Narrows. Weyerhaeuser had a regular SWAT team of police officers at the ready, and the activists were removed…but not before they ruffled some shareholder feathers by letting them know where–and how–the company gets their quarterly dividends.

(Quick review for those of you not familiar with our battle with Weyerhaeuser: The Grassy Narrows community has been demanding that clear-cut logging stop on their land since 2000, and the Canadian constitution protects their right to preserve their territory for traditional activities such as hunting, which is hard to do when the ecosystem is dead.)

Grassy Narrows also had allies inside the meeting. A handful of RAN sympathizers used the normally polite Q&A period to make Weyerhaeuser execs explain their actions in Grassy Narrows to investors. One woman announced that she had bought Weyerhaeuser stock to support sustainable forestry, but learning about devastation and human rights abuses across the border made her furious. OK, alright: the woman was a plant, but she did call us last night fuming about the blatant lies on Weyerhaeuser’s website.

It was a powerful experience for the activists, and one I’m pretty sure the execs (and security team) won’t forget. One activists is telling me now that I should say a lot of love was felt in the action–and it’s true, it’s love for the planet and for our friends in Grassy Narrows that makes us keep going head to head with a company that is unabashed about its abusive, smarmy business practices.

Earlier this week 6 political leaders of the Indigenous Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation were sentenced to 6 months in jail for refusing to allow mining and exploration on their traditional lands.

KI councilor Cecilia Begg, the only woman among the KI six, is now all alone in the Thunder Bay District jail, a notorious jail that has seen 3 aboriginal deaths in the last 4 years.

Please take action to support the KI six.

You can write letters to Cecilia at:

Thunder Bay Detention Centre
Highway 61 South
PO Box 1900
Thunder Bay ON
P7C 4Y4

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

March 20, 2008 Thursday

Are the KI Six outlaws or prisoners of conscience?

BYLINE: RACHEL ARISS, Legal specialist in the Department of Sociology
at Lakehead University

As of this week, Chief Donny Morris and five other band council members
of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation sit in jail. They were
sentenced on Monday to six months in prison by Mr. Justice Patrick
Smith of the Ontario Superior Court in Thunder Bay.

So what “crime” did they commit?

KI First Nation leaders signed Treaty 9 in 1929 to protect their
ability to feed themselves in their homeland (600 kilometres northwest
of Thunder Bay) by hunting, fishing and trapping, and to prevent the
encroachment of early miners and loggers. The native community saw the
treaty as a peaceful way to share the land with newcomers, while
remaining connected to the land’s sustenance and sacredness.

But in the winter of 2005-06, Platinex, a mining-exploration company,
tried to drill on land for which it had staked a claim pursuant to
Ontario’s mining laws but which land also is subject to Treaty 9. KI
First Nation members protested on the site, preventing the drilling
from proceeding. The company sued for damages and sought an injunction
to prevent further protests.

It was the KI First Nation, however, that received an interim
injunction based on the irreparable harm it would suffer if drilling
went ahead as Platinex had planned. The injunction was granted on
condition that the parties negotiate toward an agreement that would
allow Platinex to drill. Ontario joined as intervenor, talks between
the three parties followed, but no agreement could be reached.

The court lifted the injunction last May and imposed an agreement,
proposed by Platinex and Ontario. KI First Nation members were ordered
to allow Platinex onto their land to drill. When they did not do this,
they were found in contempt of court.

In other words, when the people of the KI First Nation asserted their
treaty rights - to secure sustenance from the land, to live on the land
in accordance with their spiritual beliefs, and to share the land, as
equals, with the newcomers - their leaders were jailed.

How did it come to this?

Three laws converge in this place.

The first, since time immemorial and the one that is sacred to the
people of KI, is to follow the duty given to them by the Creator to
protect the land for future generations. According to this law, the
people of KI did not have to follow the court order. In all conscience,
they could not allow Platinex to drill.

Exploratory drilling - and its accompanying noise, campsite, drill pad,
machinery, fuel drums, helicopters and trucks - poses an unacceptable
risk of damaging the Big Trout Lake area, a place of reliable hunting
and fishing sites, trap lines, regular berry harvesting and burials of
still-remembered family members.

The second law, Treaty 9, was a covenant made between equals to share
the land, allowing both peoples to live peacefully together. According
to this law (and the Supreme Court has affirmed that governments must
consult with and accommodate first nations before doing anything that
may infringe treaty rights), it is the Ontario government and Platinex
that have to do things differently. Jailing the KI leadership will not
lead Ontario to properly consult with and accommodate the community’s
concerns - it may do the opposite.

The third law is Ontario’s Mining Act, with its outdated free-entry
staking system. The contradiction between the Mining Act and KI’s
treaty rights is key to understanding why the native leaders are in
jail.

The act allows anyone to stake a claim anywhere on Crown land and, as
soon as it is filed with the government, it is valid. The act does not
mention that all Crown land in Ontario is governed by treaties with
first nations people. It doesn’t even include the minimal first step of
requiring companies or the ministry to communicate with first nations
about exploration. The system makes money for Ontario and, especially,
for mining companies.

Ontario has long resisted fulfilling its treaty promises, perhaps
hoping that impoverished remote communities will not fight for their
rights. Its pattern has been to resist until there is a crisis, until
the damage of broken trust with aboriginal peoples has been entrenched
- Ipperwash and Caledonia are the most recent and most publicized
evidence of this pattern.

Ontario has failed in its duty to consult, accommodate and, more
important, to reconcile with first nations communities across the
province. First nations people and their supporters are tired of this
deliberate failure.

Many aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in this province want to find
a way forward, out of the poverty, racism and despair facing many first
nations communities, toward living together peacefully and
respectfully.

Some of these folks were at the courthouse in Thunder Bay on Monday.
Others attended the courthouse in Kingston when Bob Lovelace, a member
of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, was sentenced in February to six
months in jail for opposing mining exploration on his community’s
traditional lands. We will not go away.

The KI Six have been in jail since Monday. They are in jail because
they believe they have a spiritual duty to protect the land for future
generations, and they believe that drilling the land is not protecting
it. They are in jail because they believe they have legally
recognizable treaty rights that remain meaningful as long as they can
maintain their homeland in its pristine state.

The KI Six are prisoners of conscience.

Clearly, the dispute between the KI First Nation and Platinex is a
crisis. But a Band-Aid solution from Ontario is not enough. It is time
for all of us, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, to stand up with the KI
community and demand justice, and to continue demanding justice until
we have true reconciliation between aboriginal and non-aboriginal
people in Ontario.

Last week women from Grassy went out to the edges of their land, near where some cutting of the forest is still taking place. One of the women sent out this statement:

We will go there to feel a little bit of the suffering the land is feeling. We will go there to feel the life of our traditional laws which still roam strong amongst the animals, land, trees, water and spirits. Our laws still exist we just have to bring life to them by exerting them, by living them not just talking about them. They are being undermined by foreign laws and system of government and we are allowing this.

I feel I am trying to bring life to our laws but I am being charged right now by foreign and alien laws for building cabins. I am determined to continue so much so that this past weekend (and as often as I can) I took my six year old granddaughter Ashenokwa out there by snow mobile. What I’m doing is for her, my sons, future generations… We should be out there without fear, without being disturbed, without anyone stopping us for being who we are.

I am finding it hard to fight in their courts because it’s all to do with having money. I am not able to find this money. I cannot take money from my people too.

We will eventually head out soon. We will go there to pray for our relatives that are suffering, our kids that are being abused with alcohol and drugs, we will pray that our people remain strong and not fall prey to little deals, we will pray for strength, we will pray for unity, for health….

The Vatican, in an effort to modernize the Catholic Church, has revised the list of mortal sins. Even those of us who fell asleep in the pews could recite the old list thanks to its archaic but charismatic words (sloth, wrath, avarice, etc.) but the new list has a decidedly contemporary character:

1. Genetic modification
2. Human experimentation
3. Polluting the environment
4. Causing social injustice
5. Causing poverty
6. Obscene wealth
7. Taking drugs

I’m not a Catholic, so I didn’t know that there’s a whole department of the Catholic Church put in charge of managing sins (the Apostolic Penitentiary) but Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti says that these are really more of an update than brand new sins. Pollution is a new form of gluttony, for instance.

If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has an impact and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization.

Rev. John Wauck from Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross explains it further:

We’re seeing now that the kinds of sin that have an impact not on particular individuals—I stole my neighbor’s property or I damaged his property—but I polluted in a way that damaged the entire environment, which doesn’t belong to me … it’s a sin in a certain sense against all of us.

The Vatican is walking the talk, as well, having committed to installing over 1000 solar panels, printing prayerbooks on recycled paper, and starting a reforestation program.

What struck me most about the list was that many companies, and not just the targets of RAN, now have mortal sins as their explicit mission statement. In fact, their charters are often the combination of two or more Seven Deadly Sins, like “Become Obscenely Wealthy by Polluting the Environment through Genetic Modification”.

We’re in the middle of Lent and Father James Martin, acting publisher of the Jesuit magazine America, notes this fact as well:

If you work for a company that pollutes the environment, you have something more important to consider for Lent than whether or not to give up chocolate.

It seems our targets have an authority greater than RAN they need to watch out for now.

“We All Live at Climate Ground Zero”

It is time for American citizens to take leadership & direct action and make our politicians accountable to us. To this end we announce a Citizens Direct Action Training Camp in June 2008 in Montana to oppose and confront the massive fossil fuel development of the Rocky Mountain Corridor from Fort MacMurry, Alberta all the way to New Mexico. We oppose:

• Alberta Tar Sands and Coal Development
• Development of Coal in Montana and Wyoming feeding America’s electricity appetite
• Montana Governor Schweitzer’s plan to import Alberta dirty fossils into the USA through transmission lines from coal plants in Alberta, and 7 proposed Tar Sand refineries in Montana
• Proposed massive oil shale developments in Utah and Colorado
• Transmission lines off of coal fired power plants proposed all over US
• Mountain Top Removal coal mining

The Action Training will be five day training and include skills needed to do effective Direct Action Campaigning against dirty fossil projects and for a clean energy future. Sessions will include History and Practice Non Violent Direct Action, Campaign Strategy, Direct Actions Skills, Media Skills, Community Organizing

Where: Montana - site to be announced
When: June 1st – June 6th 2008

This camp sponsored by ClimateGroundZero.org and GlobalWarmingSolution.org and is being hosted and organized by:

Mike Roselle- Founder - Earth First!, RAN, and The Ruckus Society
JR Roof - Former Director of Greenpeace International Ships and Direct Action Division, Co-founder The Ruckus Society, ClimateGroundZero.org

For further information or to apply to attend - contact: JR Roof at jr@globalwarmingsolution.org

More »

What happened: Boise announced yesterday that it “wishes to honor the request of Chief Fobister to discontinue sourcing fiber from the Traditional Use Area of Grassy Narrows”. Check out their letter here: boises-letter.pdf AbitibiBowater, the world’s largest paper company, clear-cuts trees from Grassy Narrow’s traditional territory in northwestern Ontario, and sells pulp from these trees to Boise. Boise makes paper from this pulp and sells a huge percentage of it to OfficeMax in the United States and Grand & Toy in Canada.

What this means: Boise’s announcement that they will stop purchasing pulp that comes from Grassy Narrows means that our efforts to recruit support from OfficeMax and Grand & Toy worked! Congratulations and thank you to everyone who participated in the international day of action at OfficeMax and Grand & Toy on January 30th (just a few weeks ago!)

What’s next? Grassy Narrows is still demanding a moratorium of all industrial activity on their traditional territory (including logging), Our primary concern right now is to push Weyerhaeuser and AbitibiBowater to follow Boise’s lead.

We want to hear from you! Now is a great time to weigh in with great ideas. A moratorium in Grassy Narrows is in our sights and creative thinking and clever ideas are definitely encouraged during this critical moment!

Thank You Thank You to everyone who has supported the Old Growth campaign! I am so happy to share the news of this milestone, and I hope that we can celebrate an even bigger victory in the near future.

- Annie

“I’m prepared to go to jail for my belief in my land.”

Those words were spoken by Chief Donny Morris in a Thunder Bay Ontario courtroom on
January 25th. With those words it became crystal clear that Chief Morris and his small
fly-in community can not, and will not back down in their stand to protect their
traditional territory from unwanted exploitation.

For two years the community has stood strong in the face of government and industry pressure, hardball negotiatons, and a 10 Billion dollar lawsuit. Now the community is preparing for the very real threat of jail time for community leaders who continue to deny access to the mining company Platinex that is trying to drill samples aimed at developing a mine near the Native Community. Community leaders say are confident that if they go to jail other leaders will stand up in their place and hundreds of others will be ready to step up to defend their rights, their sustenance, their spirituality, and the future of their children.

KI is one of at least 9 communities in Northern Ontario who have declared moratoriums on industry in their territories. Those communities are part of a federation whose combined territories in Ontario’s Boreal forest encompass an intact forest area larger than all US roadless areas combined.

This is a landscape of hope where there is a still a chance to do things right for the land and its peoples. Communities like KI are showing us the way by standing up for their rights, their land, and securing a hopeful future for all peoples by creating a powerful movement of self-determining, proud communities protecting the sources of life and livelihood that we all depend on.

I believe that our best shot at renewing our society through respect for humanity and ecology is by supporting communities like KI and organizing our own communities to stand up for earth and justice in our own backyards.

Check out this update from our friends at OSU

Today, Thursday the 14th, Free The Planet members directly confronted
OSU President Gordon Gee, not once, but twice. This morning I went to
see Kate Wolford, assistant to the President and Director of Operations
here at OSU. She is one of the university’s key negotiators at the
environmental task force (the group in charge of drafting our
sustainable forest policy). I wanted to give her some photos of
clear-cuts in the Boreal forest and another copy of our demands -
seeing as how “blind-sided” she said she felt by FTP members demands for
a full forest resources policy on Tuesday I thought she might like a
refresher before today’s task force meeting. Well, Kate wasn’t there,
apparently she was already off having pre-meetings with other task force
members - but that’s ok, cuz guess who WAS there, and with no Kate as a
body guard, President Gordon Gee!

President Gee was in the middle of an international meeting with a
German university president snapping pictures of handshakes and signing
documents with fancy ink pens. No sooner than Gee suggested “let’s
congratulate ourselves” did things start going downhill for his meeting.
I walked right in (after all the door was open) and placed our demands
and clear-cut pictures right on top of all those fancy pens of theirs
and asked that President Gee please stop destroying endangered forests.
Oh man, can his brows get furled!, (and our poor international guest, he
looked so totally confused). Needless to say, the laughing & snapshots
stopped and Gee kinda flipped. Attempting to remain calm, Gee excused
himself and started jabbing me in the chest with his finger as he said,
“there is a process, you can’t just interrupt my meetings, i’ll have you
arrested!” It was all pretty comical - his fingers are pretty damn bony
though, “ouch man!”. On my way out I chatted with one of the German
reps, apologized for having to interrupt their meeting and filled him in
about our 8hr sit-in on Tuesday and told him i would have much rather
spoke with President Gee then.

Not even 20 minutes later a second Gee Interception (man, Kate, you’re
really dropping the ball here) at the president’s office happened. A
second member of Free The Planet had come in wishing to had Kate copies
of our 2,600 or so petition signatures but walked right into good old
Gordon Gee instead. This FTPer got the same rap about “process” from
President Gee (minus the finger jabbing) but Gee’s not the only one
who’s masted the broken record messaging - our FTP activist retorted
with, “your process doesn’t work for us!” It’s clear FTPers know what we
want and we’re not dealing with process any longer!!!

I guess the moral of the story here President Gee is, “your process
doesn’t work for us!” GET OUT OF ENDANGERED FORESTS NOW!