Breathing: The intersection of COVID-19, Climate Change and #BLM

 “Native people have a different term for public lands: we call them home. We call them our sustainer, our library, our pharmacy, our sacred places. Indigenous identity and language are inseparable from land. Land is the residence of our more-than-human relatives, the dust of our ancestors, the holder of seeds, the makers of rain; our teacher. Land is not capital to which we have property rights; rather it is the place for which we have moral responsibility in reciprocity for its gift of life. Here is the question we must at last confront: Is land merely a source of belongings, or is it the source of our most profound sense of belonging? We can choose.”

--Robin Wall Kimmerer

by Bianca Ballara, Southern Oregon Beyond Toxics organizer

 

“I can’t breathe”. One man’s dying words, choked to death by the knee of a Minneapolis Police officer, may be the rallying cry of our era.

 

As George Floyd’s murder galvanized the largest protests in history, a respiratory pandemic swept through the world. Protestors, masked, surged in the streets, demanding a world where the right to breath was not determined by skin color.

 

Suffocation. Throughout the 20th and 21st century, extractive fossil fuel industries, disproportionately harming non-white populations, pumped out more carbon than ever before, destroying the habitability of our atmosphere. COVID-19, police violence, and climate change are lenses to see inequity. They occur in unison, amplifying each other, exacerbating simultaneously the broken fissures in our systems. 

 

And, as crises compound themselves, choking out the air, let’s turn to the land we are rooted in for answers. The ground we live on is essential, not only for historical reflection, but to inform the future.

 

In the name of U.S. imperialist expansion, Indigenous communities, African-American communities, and other communities of color have been forcibly displaced from their lands and livelihoods over the last several hundred years. 

 

In what is now known as Western Oregon, where I live, there were about 60 different tribes from six different language groups. This was before the U.S. military forced a mass removal to the Grand Ronde reservation outside Yamhill. Racism and discrimination rationalized settlers’ stealing of land. Profit and wealth were to be had through mining, timber, and farming. According to Lewis and Clark estimates, these valley tribes numbered in the 40,000. Those who made it to the reservation were counted at 900. 

 

For African Americans, between 10 and 12 million of their ancestors were captured and brought against their will to forcibly work in the Americas within the last three centuries. Again, settler racism rationalized the ends. 

 

Two dispossessions, of land and life, are the source of the United States wealth – whether through chattel slavery or illigal speculation on stolen land. To this day, without reparation or atonement to the communities, this legacy rings throughout the modern economy. Dispossession is constant.

 

According to a 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, called “Who Owns The Land?”, of all private U.S. agricultural land, Whites account for 96 percent of the owners, 97 percent of the value, and 98 percent of the acres.

 

While agricultural land is owned by Whites, it is predominantly worked by Latinx and Indigenous peoples, according to the Farmworker Health Network. Many of whom fled their home countries as a result of decades of American-backed wars, corporate land grabs, and now climate change. Their dispossession, whether through economic imperialism or destabilization, is a vital source of low-cost labor to U.S. landowners.

 

In Oregon, 174,000 farmworkers bring us abundant, fresh produce. Approximately 40% of whom are indigenous people recently displaced from Guatemala and Mexico, according to a 2008 study in the American Journal of Public Health. Instead of reparations for continued forced removal, genocide, and land dispossession, Indigenous, Black and communities of color have been kept subaltern in the United States.

 

Recent news has jolted mainstream politics to the historical legacy of such racist exclusion. Latinx and Black populations are 3 times more likely to become infected with COVID-19, the New York Times found, and in Arizona, Native people are 5% of the population but make up 16% of COVID-19-related deaths, according to the Arizona state health department. 

 

Suffocation. Deprivation of that which you need to survive: air, water, food. 

Deprivation. Poverty, starvation wages, and dispossession. These are useful symbols for an unequal society.

 

In early July, global atmospheric CO2 concentration surpassed 415 part per million for the first time in 15 million years. This was despite the 16% fall in emissions from COVID-19 lockdown. As a result, the oceans are becoming too acidic for aquatic life, something which will affect us all. And further linked, the forests across the Amazon and central Africa (known as the Earth’s lungs) are constantly under siege and threat of industry-backed burning and deforestation. 

 

We are all experiencing the effects – but also (and this is very important) we experience the dangers of climate change disproportionately. 

 

Black, brown, and Indigenous communities experience the brunt end of environmental violence within the marginal zones where they have been displaced. From urban inner-cities, farm fields, and U.S. reservations, these families contend with toxic waste, water, and soil. In Oregon, the summer harvest is poisoned with smoke, and pipelines threaten to destroy water sources. 

 

If we don’t course correct, soon None of Us Will Breathe. 

 

Who do we turn to to address these historical inequalities? While Indigenous and people of color have continued to be displaced from their cooperative stewardship of land, global ecosystems have as a result fallen out of balance. 

 

In the Rogue Valley, there is a vision. The organizations of Unete Center for Farmworker Advocacy, the NAACP-Eugene/Springfield, and Beyond Toxics have come together to create a coalition for Black and Brown unity in the face of environmental pollution and climate change. 

 

LOCAL, which stands for Liberation of Community and Land, seeks to serve Black, Brown and Indigenous communities of Oregon in supporting their effort to secure environmental rights to clean air, clean water, and equal rights while also creating spaces to heal and discuss the injustices in their lives. LOCAL sees a future of Communities of Color working together in Oregon to create better and more resilient and diverse neighborhoods on the ground, equal rights for essential workers, and policy to protect and enhance the spaces where communities of color live, play, study, and work.

 

NativeWomanshare, too. Inspired by my work and inspired by these communities, my partner and I are co-founding a Healing Landspace for Indigenous Women and the Two-Spirit community in Murphy, OR. NativeWomanshare will emerge for the purposes of reparations, community healing and land healing, all at the same time. We are creating a safespace for the original stewards of this land and other people of color to have conversations and reclaim their own art, culture, ancestral practices, and ways of planting native seeds for medicine and food.

 

NativeWomanshare believes that if tended to once again, the plants, animals, and rivers of the Rogue Valley and beyond will surely remember and respond favorably to the lifeways and ceremonies that stewarded it for thousands of years by the Takelma, Klamath, Dakubetede, Umpqua, and other neighboring tribes.

 

LOCAL and NativeWomanshare are Rogue Valley projects aiming to address what we have done to the land and what we have done to the land’s people.

 

These projects insist that we must look to the leadership of Black, Brown, and Native people, poor people, and plants and animals who know exactly what our historical and modern crises feel like living underneath perpetual U.S. expansion. As we identify the problems, we can also locate clear solutions for healing. If the recently displaced and landless Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities are reconnected with land, we solve the issues of community healing and land healing simultaneously.

 

It is vulnerable to stand up for what we believe in. The act of making land and wealth radically more accessible to Black, Indigenous, and communities of color is timely, relevant and a planetary balm for all. It is justice for the climate, for the economy, and for communities. 

 

And as we do this great work of repairing historical injustices against Black, Indigenous, and communities of color and the land, instead of panic, I suggest that we savor each breath. Breathe deep and often. Remember, this is a marathon, not a race, and if COVID-19 and George Floyd can teach us anything, I believe it is that every breath is a gift that can also be our last.

 

Keep breathing to maintain strength. Keep breathing to express gratitude for life. Keep breathing as a reminder to others that we have a long road to make things right. It is our responsibility to fight until our whole community can breathe equally.