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St. James Residents, Water Protectors Battle Anti-Protest Laws

Protest at a Bayou Bridge pipeline site in Maurice, LA, May 12, 2018. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.

By Sasha Irby

Around the country, big energy companies are bribing politicians to pass laws that severely criminalize the protest of dangerous and costly oil and gas projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Bayou Bridge Pipeline.

These anti-protest laws have gone into effect in eight states already. In Texas, the legislature is currently considering a bill that would that would make the protest of a pipeline a third-degree felony. This means that a peaceful water protector would do the same amount of time as someone convicted of attempted murder. In Louisiana, a law (HB 727) went into effect last year which makes it a felony offense to trespass on “critical infrastructure”—a category that the law expands to include pipelines, any pipeline construction site, and “all structures, equipment, or other immovable or movable property” located within the pipeline site. More than a dozen peaceful protesters have been arrested under the new law.

On May 22 a federal lawsuit was filed by three organizations—RISE St. James, 350 New Orleans, and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade—as well 10 individuals affected by the new law. They argue that the law could be used to criminalize anyone who happens to be near the 125,000 miles of mostly unmarked pipelines that criss-cross the state of Louisiana. St. James residents are concerned the law would prohibit them from speaking out against the petrochemical industries that have turned their home into “Cancer Alley.”

How it is that we live in a state that is willing to spend millions of dollars attacking peaceful water protectors in the name of “critical infrastructure” while New Orleanians live with Sewerage and Water Board infrastructure so broken that we have frequent boil water advisories and pumps that can’t keep our streets from flooding in routine rainstorms? Is a water system that provides safe drinking water not critical infrastructure? Are safely navigable streets not critical infrastructure?

Why aren’t we issuing felonies to the crooked bureaucrats selling our wetlands off to petrochemical companies which are killing local ecosystems and threatening the very existence of our coastal communities? Because the state cares more about protecting the profits of the energy companies than it does about our public health or safety.

Among the many petrochemical and energy companies that pushed HB 727 were Energy Transfer Partners, Embridge, and Transcanada, all of which were involved in the construction of pipelines that have been met with protest in Louisiana. All three of these companies also financially contributed to Louisiana state representatives who co-sponsored the bill. At least 16 of the bill’s co-sponsors are affiliated with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), a right-wing task-force controlled by billionaires like the Koch brothers. Across the country, ALEC has pushed to enact laws that favor corporations—mainly oil and gas companies—at the expense of the public.

It is obvious that these laws do not protect the people or infrastructure that is “critical” for the public good. The energy companies are buying off politicians and fast-tracking these laws because they hope that they can stop communities from protesting the destruction of their homelands. The politicians are criminalizing free speech while subsidizing the planet-killing corporations. Worse, they are criminalizing those who fight for the future of our planet. We cannot stand by idly while our water protectors are made into criminals. We must unite with other communities in the struggle against the oil and gas executives and the state which is attempting to silence us. We must not let fear swallow our voice.

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Indian Child Welfare Act Under Attack

Chairman Tehassi Hill of the Oneida Nation, outside the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans.

By Sasha Irby

On March 14 a delegation of leaders from a coalition of 325 tribal Nations came to New Orleans’ Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the Indian Child Welfare Act against a legal challenge from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing legal organization that works for ultra rich capitalists like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. The Goldwater Institute supports lowering workers’ wages, privatizing schools, denying workers healthcare, and opposing any regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Now they have the audacity to claim to be champion of civil rights. They allege that ICWA is a form of ‘race’ based discrimination because the federal law privileges the rights of Native people to adopt their own children over the adoption rights of non-Native families. This “civil rights” challenge is a cynical smoke-screen: by attempting to reduce the people of the many Indigenous Nations to a mere race, they aim to diminish Native people’s sovereign claims to their own children, their own governments, and their own land. The capitalists who are heading up the challenge to ICWA are eager to get their hands on the land and resources currently under the political control of Indigenous Nations.

The idea that right-wing advocacy groups are fighting against ICWA because they feel that it is ethically unjust is an insult to those who know the painful history that necessitated the law’s creation. IWCA was passed in 1978 to help stop the widespread kidnapping of Native children from their families by state and federal agencies. These children were then “adopted” into non-Indigenous households. For over a century the United States government operated according to the genocidal philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Governmental policies sought to assimilate Native children into white society by removing them from their families, elders, and communities and placing them with white families or forcibly sending them to boarding schools to be stripped of their language, culture, spiritual practices, and identity. Even after the boarding school era, Native children were torn from their families at an alarming rate. Before the passing of ICWA, up to 1 in 3 Indigenous children were adopted into non-Native households.

ICWA is vital for the future of Indigenous Nations, and attempting to dismantle the law is a direct attack on the sovereignty of our peoples. Children remaining in families of their own tribal membership allow them access to their culture, their lifeways, and – key for maintaining tribal sovereignty – their tribal citizenship. The destruction of Indigenous sovereignty has always been the goal of imperial project of the colonizers.  By leaving our children vulnerable to forced removal from their Nations, you strip that child of access to their identity and their part in their Nation’s future.  By stealing the children, you drain the lifeblood of our Nations.  Our tribal cohesion crumbles and eventually our numbers dwindle and we die out.  Without our children, our future is written in sand.