Camaray Devalos: Colonial mindset continues to destroy tribes

There are countless incidents where corporations have set up their toxic workshops on Native land, usually without the consent of the tribe. These corporations promise the tribes jobs, while stripping the resources from the earth to gain profit. In doing so, they physically harm Indigenous people and wildlife living in the vicinity of these extraction sites, and sometimes sacred sites.

At the Nett Lake reservation in Minnesota, the Potlatch Timber Corporation releases pounds of unsafe formaldehyde into the atmosphere. These emissions pollute the environment as well as people that live near it with cancers and ocular damage. But wait, there’s more. James Bay, once a rich ecosystem, is now being disrupted by Hydro-Electric exploration with “four major rivers destroyed and five 735 KV power lines cut[ting] a swatch through the wilderness” (LaDuke). The amount of mercury in the reservoirs is also at an all-time high, and is contaminating human and animal life alike. As you can imagine, hunting and trapping areas have been desecrated, leaving Natives to abandon traditional subsistence ways.

See a pattern? All this is happening mainly in Indian Country. To me, it’s no accident. I see it as a modern day tactic to eradicate Native people, albeit in a surreptitious, sinister way. Why don’t large mining corporations start their sites in non-Native land? Is it because they know there are too many people living there that would disapprove, and many of them non-Native? Why is it that Natives’ concerns are illegitimate compared to that of non-Native citizens?

Settler ethnocentrism and racism allows settlers to see Indigenous people as less than, much of it having to do with the genocidal circumstances of our past. Natural resource corporations are essentially taking back the land that was “given” to Natives in an act of cultural, physical and clandestine genocide. A recent example would be the United States House passing the legislation that gave an international copper mining company sacred Apache land, Oak Flat. In my mind, I believe the U.S. government and certain corporations are cohorts, scratching the backs of each other with the same agenda: make money and eradicate the expendables by any means necessary. Guess who we are?