As Long as Grass Grows Quotes

“Resistance became a way of life a long time ago; only the tactics change. The federal government has never relinquished power over Native people without a fight, and the degree to which it has is directly attributable to work initiated by Native people themselves. In other words, more than any “granting” of rights by the United States, it is their bold assertions of self-determination, aided at times by powerful allies, that accounts for progress Native people have made in their relationships with the United States over the last century. Indigenous peoples have learned that no one is coming to save them, just as environmentalists have learned that their American legal system is a rigged game against the environment and their own communities. This is a pattern engrained by the forces of white settler colonialism and domination paradigms, but the growing sophistication in using education, law, and politics to advance tribal self-determination will continue to build a wall of defense against environmentally destructive corporate and government encroachments.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“When Republicans secured control of both the executive and legislative branches of government in 2017, the stage was set for the monument shrinking by at least 85 percent under secretary of the interior Ryan Zinke, who was acting on a Trump campaign promise.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“It may be true as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. What is equally true, however, is that most of the time we have to forcibly bend it with our very own hands. —THOMAS LINZEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL DEFENSE FUND”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“US courts routinely deny Native legal appeals to protect lands where there are sacred sites, the precedent having been set in the Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988). In Lyng the court ruled that building a road through a site of traditional spiritual significance and ceremonial practice of three tribes in Northern California (Karuk, Tolowa, and Yurok) did not constitute a violation of their freedom of religion. The court argued that “the First Amendment bars only outright prohibitions, indirect coercion, and penalties on the free exercise of religion.”22 Lyng set a dangerous precedent that continues to haunt Native American battles to protect sacred sites. While AIRFA guarantees access to sacred sites, the Lyng decision illustrates why and how the Karuk, Tolowa, and Yurok tribes were unable to find protection for their sites based on the act. It comes down to differences in how religion is conceived in Western and Indigenous worldviews.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“the Indigenous world is a world of relationships built on reciprocity, respect, and responsibility, not just between humans but also extending to the entire natural”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“Legal strategies aimed at protecting the salamander may have failed to stop the project, but it raised troubling and provocative questions about what it means for non-Indians to use environmental issues as a political wedge against tribes’ right to exercise sovereignty, especially if seen through a lens that recognizes settler colonialism as an ongoing process of environmental injustice.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The first climate refugees in the US are the Biloxi Chitimacha people of Isle de Jean Charles, whose island home in southern Louisiana is being inundated due to rising sea levels. The relocation of the Biloxi Chitimacha people is also particularly complex, because it involves the relocation of an entire community, not just individuals.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“2014, Indian Country Today reported that of the United States’ 1,322 Superfund sites, 532 of them were located on Indian lands—an astoundingly disproportionate figure considering how little of the US land base is Indian trust land. Superfund sites are designated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. These sites are not just uranium or coal mines either.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The uranium it took to create those first-generation weapons came predominantly from the lands of the Navajo Nation, at a cost that Navajo and other Native peoples are still paying in human and nonhuman life today.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“What followed was a string of gruesome murders between 1921 and 1925 that left dozens of people dead, mostly Osage—and in one case an entire family—in a vast conspiracy carried out by multiple white men in order to gain access to Indian lands and inherit Osage oil wealth through calculated intermarriage.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The United Nations currently does not recognize colonialism as genocide, which is not surprising given that the most powerful members of the United Nations are colonial States.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“Termination included a plan to relocate reservation Indians to cities under the guise of a jobs program, where they were given one-way tickets to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other cities. Relocation amounted to a wholesale population transfer away from reservations to urban environments, and as a result, today most American Indians live away from their reservation communities. Under the termination policy 109 tribes lost their federal recognition (over one-third of them in California alone) and thus their political relationship to the US, affecting 1,369,000 acres of Indian lands and 12,000 Native people.32 While many urban Native people today maintain connection to their homelands, their lives and identities are mediated and shaped by these histories of dispossession and displacement.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“California was deeply engaged in its explicitly genocidal campaign against the Indigenous populations,”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“In New Mexico, the military pursuit of the Diné (Navajos) from 1863 to 1865 to relocate them onto a reservation in the eastern part of the state resulted in the death and enslavement of thousands.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” (1850–65). It created a system of indentured servitude of children and adults, characterized as “apprenticeship.” It also codified vagrancy, in which Indians were punished by being “hired” out to bidders in public auctions if they could not pay the bond or bail.20 With the constant illegal settler encroachments”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“Advanced” knowledge, innovation, technology and wealth have accelerated the insatiable need to feed, finance and advance growth and development, consuming natural resources at a rate that exceeds Mother Earth’s ability to restore.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“other words, the State has become the sole determiner of Native nationhood, despite the longevity of a people and a community that have been tied to a place since time immemorial and their collective ongoing Indigenous identity.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“Karl Marx recognized colonialism as the genesis of what he called “primitive accumulation,” connecting colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. He wrote, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The wealth generated in the Americas (much of it transferred to Europe) could only accumulate from centuries of violent Indigenous displacement, genocide, and land theft.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The demonstrators refused the term “protestors,” referring to themselves instead as “water protectors,” and their main organizing principle was peaceful prayer and ceremony.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“The agency’s mandate requires that only 7 percent of natural gas lines and 44 percent of all hazardous liquid lines be subject to rigorous and regular inspection criteria. The rest are inspected less often.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock

“People in these organizations might have access to lawyers trained in federal Indian law, but law is only one aspect of the EJ world, especially when it comes to Indian country, not to mention the fact that federal Indian law is a creation of colonial forces and not particularly designed to deliver justice to Indian people.”
― Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock