Feminism and Indigenous Environmentalism:
Two Case Studies Within the Americas

 

By: Sharlene O’Donnell, Western Carolina University

 

           There is a strong connection between feminism and Indigenous environmental movements in the Americas. This paper explores the relationship between these interconnected movements by discussing two case studies: the Water Protectors and the #NoDAPL movement in the United States along with Berta Cáceres and the Civic Council of Popular Indigenous Organizations (COPINH) in Honduras. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been actively resisting colonization for centuries, and these twenty-first century cases add to that long history.

           The purpose of researching this topic is to understand how feminism is incorporated into Indigenous American environmental activism. Indigenous female scholars such as Luana Ross (Selish Ktunaxa Flathead) believe that with all the definitions of feminism in the world, it is the issues of colonialism and sovereignty that are the most important for Indigenous definitions of feminism.^[1] Sarah A. Nickel (Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc) explains that during the feminist movements of the twentieth century, it was motherhood, family, and community well-being that were key issues in political contexts of Indigenous feminism.^[2] There was also a recognition of male-caused violence in their communities.^[3] Specific to this research, I began with questions such as: How do the women explain their causes and why are they at the forefront of these environmental movements? What are the connections between these movements? How do Indigenous women speak about historical colonialism and contemporary globalism? How do these problems fit into their feminist and environmentalist ideologies and activisms?

            To address these questions, I utilized a mixture of secondary and primary sources. In organization, I first reference secondary literature to gain an understanding of the main concepts that are discussed throughout the paper. Next, I examine two case studies by using a mixture of secondary and primary sources such as journalistic books, interviews by independent news outlets and non-profit organizations, documentary videos, and collections of accounts written by the activists involved. I start with the Water Protectors in the United States where many women were involved in starting the #NoDAPL movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Then, I move to Honduras with a discussion of the Civic Council of Popular Indigenous Organizations (COPINH), which was co-founded by Berta Cáceres, a Lenca Indigenous woman. Additionally, this paper will discuss other women who are involved in the organization. Lastly, I will conclude with a discussion of the women involved in the two cases.

Feminism, Environmentalism, and Colonialism

           To begin, an understanding of feminism, environmentalism, and colonialism is warranted. Reviewing recent literature on the subject will help to understand the case studies that this paper will discuss. Environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, in her early work The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, examines feminist history and the ecology movement.^[4] Merchant argues that history must be viewed not only from a women’s perspective but also from a viewpoint of racial minority groups and from the viewpoint of nature itself. When nature, the earth, and the cosmos stopped being viewed as living organisms and instead as machines that produce commodities and resources, this “sanctioned the domination of both nature and women.”^[5] She argues,

“Both the women’s movement and the ecology movement are sharply critical of the cost of competition, aggression, and domination arising from the market economy’s modus operandi in nature and society.”^[6]

Capitalism, technology, and progress, ideals that are held in high esteem by Euro-American societies, are criticized by the ecology movement. The women’s movement exposes the human cost in this competitive atmosphere.

            Kate Shanley, in a chapter titled “Thoughts on Indian Feminism” in the multiauthor book Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, attempts to clarify the definition of feminism.^[7] She recognizes that many issues that women encounter are universal. However, there are key differences for American Indian women. From the perspective of an Indigenous women who grew up on a reservation in the United States, she explains,

                        “Thus, the Indian women’s movement seeks equality in two ways that do not concern mainstream women: (1) on the individual level, the Indian woman struggles to promote the survival of social structure whose organizational principles represent notions of family different from those of the mainstream, and (2) on the societal level, the People seek sovereignty as a people in order to maintain a vital legal and spiritual connection to the land, in order to survive as a people.”^[8]

            For Shanley, it is cultural definitions of family, the connection to the environment, and sovereignty that are most important for Indigenous women.

            There is also a relationship between urbanization and colonialism that can be oppressive for women. Leslie Kern’s book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World briefly discusses Indigenous women in this context.^[9] She argues that Indigenous women historically in the Americas have been perceived as a threat to development and urbanization by the state. Their traditionally held positions of power in their communities were, and still are, a direct challenge to European patriarchy. Kern argues,

“Stripping Indigenous women of this power by imposing European patriarchal family and governance systems while simultaneously dehumanizing Indigenous women as primitive and promiscuous laid the groundwork for the legal and geographic processes of dispossession and displacement.”^[10]

          Colonizers utilized violence and shame to incorporate Indigenous women into the urban transformations of nations, and Kern argues this aggression is still in practice today.

           The multi-authored book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto breaks down feminist ideology concerning environmentalism and colonialism.^[11] Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser argue that capitalism created “classes of racialized human beings, whose person and work are devalued and subject to expropriation.”^[12] This includes the “postcolonial” global South where “debt-fueled corporate land grabs drive masses of indigenous and tribal peoples from their lands.”^[13] They state that feminist activism is important because gender violence under capitalism is a “systemic condition.”^[14] It is ingrained into every political space, including law, economic institutions, the state and its borders, mainstream popular culture, and in the environment where it slowly “eats away at our communities and habitats.”^[15]

          For the authors of Feminism for the 99%, the capitalism crisis equates to an ecological crisis, and the ecological crisis equates to a woman’s crisis. Women are at the “front-lines” of these crises; they are the first victims of initial colonization and face “harassment, political rape, and enslavement,” and the “destruction of the infrastructures that enabled them to provide for themselves and their families.”^[16] In the present ecological crisis, women make up eighty percent of the climate refugees globally.^[17] The authors explain that in the global South women are responsible for providing the necessities for their families, and when their environments are experiencing drought, pollution, and land overexploitation, this causes damage to their person, families, and communities. In the global North, women in communities of color are at higher risk of environmental poisoning from lack of corporate regulations and living in housing built in areas prone to flooding. Therefore, on a global scale, feminist strikes are “becoming the catalyst and model for broad-based efforts.”^[18] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser make it clear as to what they believe makes true feminist activism:

“Unlike those ‘green finance’ projects, which dissolve nature into a miasma of quantitative abstraction, women’s struggles focus on the real world, in which social justice, the well-being of human communities, and the sustainability of nonhuman nature are inextricably bound up together.”^[19]

These are words to contemplate in examining the next two cases from the United States and Honduras.

Water Protectors and the #NoDAPL Movement – United States

            There is a prophecy in Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) oral tradition that a great Black Snake named Zuzeca Sapa would one day extend itself across the land and “spew death and destruction” from its many heads endangering all life on Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth); the water would be the first to be destroyed.^[20] Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) explains that for Oceti Sakowin, “Zuzeca Sapa is DAPL,” the Dakota Access Pipeline, “and all oil pipelines trespassing through Indigenous territory.”^[21] The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172-mile pipeline that transports oil across North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. It passes under two rivers, the Missouri River twice and the Mississippi River once, along with numerous other streams, lakes, tributaries, and the Ogallala Aquifer.^[22] As early as 2014, the Oglala Sioux had already “declared war” on the Keystone XL Pipeline, and in 2016, the #NoDAPL movement was born at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline.^[23] In response to DAPL construction, Indigenous women began to mobilize and developed the Sacred Stone Spirt Camp, along with many other camps as the movement became bigger, to block pipeline construction.

            These women call themselves Water Protectors, and they have vowed to protect the waters that the pipelines threaten and the lands that are protected by the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. They can be heard, alongside men and “two-spirit” non-gender conforming Indigenous people, to declare “Mni Wiconi” or “Water is Life!” The words “Water is Life!” has a double meaning. On one hand, water creates and nourishes all life, but on the other, the Mni Sose, or Missouri River, is alive. She is a non-human relative to the Oceti Sakowin, therefore she deserves protection just like a family member.^[24] For the Water Protectors it is more than a pipeline that they are in defense against, but “the continuation of life on a planet ravaged by capitalism.”^[25]

            Many women were at the forefront of this movement, the Indigenous female youth being some of the most important that spread global awareness through social media, hence the hashtag at the beginning of #NoDAPL. Meredith Privott, in The American Indian Quarterly, explains that when these Water Protectors speak from a philosophy of responsibility, they,

“locate agency in traditional teachings and in the experience of Indigenous women, including responsive care in/to the interconnectedness of life, the special role of women in the care of water, and the collective survival of Indigenous women in colonial and patriarchal violence.”^[26]

       Some of these women include LaDonna Bravebull Allard, Kim TallBear, Kanahus Manuel, Tara Hauska, Kandi Mosset, Zaysha Grinnell, Jasilyn Charger, and Ann Hoisington. Other women participated in the movement, but these women were among the most prominent. Their words are accessible through published interviews and they have appeared in press conferences with the media. Their words give meaning to this movement more than any secondary source.

        LaDonna Bravebull Allard (Standing Rock Sioux) was one of the founding members of the Sacred Stone Camp in April 2016. She is the Standing Rock Tribal Historian and works for the Tribal Historic Preservation Office. Her family land was the closest to the property being destroyed for the pipeline. For her, this meant a personal fight to keep the pipeline from desecrating her son’s grave that is near the pipeline easement along with the land of her ancestors beyond her personal property. In a press conference on October 5, 2016, at the Sacred Stone Camp that was established on her land, she stated, “I’m a mother first, then I’m a grandmother.” She explained that she and the other women sitting with her in the press conference, referring to Kanahus Manuel and Tara Hauska, were there to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, and “We are here to protect the water. We are here to unify all the people across the world to stand up for the water.” She believes the youth are the footprint of the movement and she further explained, “Water is female, water is us, we have to protect the water,” and “If we stop protecting the water, we die.”^[27]

       Kanahus Manuel and Tara Hauska are both lawyers and identified as Water Protectors. After Allard spoke, they explained they are at the forefront of the battle fighting the colonial governments of the United States and Canada that are funding the pipeline project. Manual explained there is a connection between violence against women and violence against the Earth. She stated that Indigenous women have always been at the front lines of colonial violence, describing reproductive violence that has “ripped out” Indigenous babies from their mothers like it its “ripping out the Earth.”^[28] Toxic waste and pollution caused by capitalistic endeavors kill the food and the Earth. She equated this to an act of genocide, stating that killing the environment is equal to killing the identity of the Indigenous.

       Zaysha Grinnell (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), in an interview with Jaskiran Dhillon, recognized the urgency of the situation.^[29] She voiced her concern that the pipeline would break, and it would adversely affect people, animals, and aquatic life. She stated, “Basically everything that my people value and care for is at great risk of being harmed.”^[30] Similarly, in the press conference, Hauska reminded the listeners of how Indigenous people around the world are some of the first people who are impacted by climate change and capitalistic development, women most glaringly, explaining,

“We bear the brunt of climate change, we bear the brunt of fossil fuel extraction, and as women and life-givers we bear the brunt of a human cost of these projects. There are several man camps right around us, we know this.”^[31]

       “Man camps” are the camps of construction crews that are working on the pipeline. These women make a connection between climate change, capitalism, and violence against women. Hauska, in the press conference, explained that there is much violence against women and children when these camps are near their lands, including rape, harassment, kidnapping, sex trafficking, pedophilia, drugs and alcohol, and sometimes murder.

        For many of these women, it is this violence that calls them to defend their people and the Earth. When Mosset held the microphone at the press conference, she explained they are putting their bodies on the line, not as protesters but as protectors. Grinnell, a fifteen-year-old Indigenous woman and one of the youth leaders, explains this is part of the reason she became involved with the resistance against DAPL. In the interview with Dhillon, she states,

“I saw the lands that I had grown up on getting destroyed little by little, drill by drill. The people I grew up to love and care for were being sexually abused and sexually harassed on a daily basis. When these oil companies come in they bring in the men. These men bring with them the man camps and with that comes violence and sex trafficking. Indigenous women and girls near the camps are really affected by this, and we are not going to put up with it. Making more girls into leaders, because we witness it firsthand, is so important. As a young Indigenous woman, I can feel the suffering of my people.”^[32]

       At the press conference, a letter was read out loud by Jasilyn Charger (Cheyenne Sioux), a fellow Water Protector and co-founder of the International Indigenous Youth Council. In her letter, she explained that when she heard the pipeline was coming, she became a Water Protector because it was going to directly affect her home, her family, and her tribe. She states,

“It is something I have just been drawn to as a woman, because of our connection to the earth. As a life-giver, it is something I feel I needed to do. It is my duty as a woman.”^[33]

        Charger also stressed the fact that the Indigenous youth must be a part of the discussion because their lives are being directly impacted by negotiations between the tribes and the colonial governments.

         Helena Wong (Asian American), a delegate from the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, was also present during the Standing Rock press conference. Wong held a picture of the feminist and environmental activist Berta Cáceres (Lenca), an Indigenous woman from Honduras that was murdered five months prior. She explained explains she was at Standing Rock on a “Berta Vive” Feminist Delegation to stand in solidarity with the #NoDAPL movement. She was there to bring awareness of what the United States government is doing to Indigenous communities all over the world, and to call out extractive practices and the perpetuation of environmental racism. While Wong is speaking about Cáceres, the Native American women at the table, these Water Protectors and leaders of the resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline and colonial governments of the United States and Canada, are all nodding their heads in awareness of this fellow Indigenous woman’s death in the battle to protect her environment and community from capitalist exploitation.^[34]

Berta Cáceres and the Civic Council of Popular Indigenous Organizations (COPINH) – Honduras

            There was a warrior hero named Lempira in Honduras at the time of Spanish occupation in the 1500s who united two hundred tribes to defend themselves against the colonizers. Unfortunately, Lempira was killed, and the tribes defeated. However, the Indigenous Lenca people believed that after this event, one day “a mystical woman would rescue them and restore the defeated nation.”^[35] This myth was re-counted by environmental justice journalist Nina Lakhani in her book Who Killed Berta Cáceres? in telling the story of feminist and environmental activist Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (Lenca). Cáceres was a self-proclaimed “defender and a fighter for humanity.”^[36] She, and many other women around her like Pascuala (Pascualita) Vásquez and Miriam Miranda, were, and are, activists in the Civil Council of Popular Indigenous Organizations (COPINH) that Cáceres co-founded in 1993. Lakhani explains, “COPINH was founded to revive Lenca fortunes in Honduras,” and its members campaigned for “human rights, indigenous rights and demilitarization in the same breath.”^[37]

           COPINH was established to bring Indigenous people out of “pre-history” and into the present. They were fighting Honduran state rhetoric that they did not exist anymore, that they were “living fossils, the stuff of history and folklore,” and not ancestral communities with rights.^[38] Lakhani, and Cáceres in an interview with Frontline Defenders before her death, explained the victories that the organization had achieved over twenty years. ^[39] One such victory being the ratification by Honduras of the ILO 196 in 1995 that was an accord from the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labor Organization guaranteeing the right to self-determination. This act helped with the reclamation of more than two hundred Lenca community land titles of territories lost after colonization. Another victory that Cáceres mentioned in her interview was that the organization had blocked the privatization of natural commons and created Indigenous municipalities that built autonomy. She also explained that COPINH educated and mobilized for the rights of Indigenous women. This cause becomes much more pronounced and clearer the more you listen to Cáceres and other Lenca women speak in interviews and documentary footage about their inclinations and goals in activism and resistance.

          Berta Cáceres was murdered in March of 2016 because of her internationally recognized activism and the threat she posed to the “modernization” and “development” of Honduras. I will not go into this ongoing story here, however, it is an example of the highest form of violence against women in the fight against capitalism and colonialism. Instead, I chose to concentrate on her life, to stay focused on the initial analysis of feminism and Indigenous environmentalism. This case study includes interviews with Cáceres and other women, including her daughter, on their ideals and philosophies of Indigenous activism, environmentalism, and resistance before and after Cáceres’ death. Before Cáceres’ death, she was involved with blocking megaprojects like the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam being built by the company Desarrollos Energeticos SA (DESA) and its construction contractor, the Chinese energy company Sinohydro^[40] This project threatened the Gualcarque River and the Lenca communities that depend on the ecosystem and spiritual services it provides. Lakhani explains,

“The hydroelectric project would dissect the sacred river and divert the water away from local needs, generating electricity to be sold to the national energy company (ENEE). The Lenca people know that without the river, there could be no life in Río Blanco.”^[41]

          Cáceres and other members of COPINH helped the community to petition local and national authorities and set up blockades resisting the state and the building of the dam, and they were successful in their resistance.

           This led to international recognition with Cáceres receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015. In her acceptance speech, Cáceres explained the worldviews of Lencan peoples, that they are made from earth, water, and corn. She stated to the enormous crowd at the award ceremony,

“The Lenca people are ancestral guardians of the rivers, in turn, protected by the spirits of young girls, who teach us that giving our lives in various ways for the protection of the rivers is giving our lives for the well-being of humanity and this planet.”^[42]

            She continued to say that the Gualcarque River called on them for protection and that Mother Earth was being violated. She told the crowd that we must “shake-free” of capitalism, racism, and the patriarchy because they “will only assure our own self-destruction.”^[43]

            In 2012, Pamela Yates, on a delegation with the Nobel Women’s Initiative investigating violence against women human rights defenders, held an interview for Skylight with Cáceres.^[44]      During this interview, Cáceres argued that Indigenous people have been in resistance for more than five hundred years, and “we will continue to battle modern-day colonialism.”^[45] Colonialism not only invades their land and privatizes their rivers and forests but also causes major human rights violations such as murder, oppression, kidnapping, and extreme unemployment rates. In an interview with Frontline Defenders from 2014, this issue is explained further, Cáceres stated, “We struggle against predatory colonial and capitalist policies, against the patriarch and against racism.”^[46] She discussed how the areas that they live in and were defending are rich in biodiversity, which is key to Lencan food sovereignty and cultural rights. Nature and culture are not divisible in the Lencan worldview.

          The rights of women are also a priority of Cáceres and COPINH, “especially Indigenous women.”^[47] There are physical, emotional, and sexual threats, along with actual harm, that target these women; they are putting their bodies on the line. She was aware of the risks she was taking, “there are hundreds of sisters in COPINH who are facing this, just like me.”^[48] Cáceres adds by saying,

“In the struggle against the privatization of rivers, in defense of forests, against the multinationals, women from COPINH have been the majority. That also gives me a lot of strength.”^[49]

         She knew she was not alone in this struggle, and not just in Honduras, but throughout the world.

         There are many other women, as well as men, involved in COPINH who defended the Lenca communities and the rivers that are so incredibly important to their peoplehood. Some of these women were mentioned by Cáceres in interviews, such as Pascualita and Miranda. Pascualita, a spiritual gude of the Lenca people, spoke during the twenty-first anniversary ceremony of COPINH to a crowd gathered around her, singling out the youth in her oration:

“you must take care of your land, you must protect all the territory, and if we don’t take care of it, if we don’t unite, then we can’t defend it, because one person alone cannot defend anything.”^[50]

         Miranda, Cáceres’ friend and fellow activist exclaimed to a crowd after Cáceres’ murder that the government is selling their country off “piece by piece” and ruining the futures of their youth. She proclaimed, thrusting her closed fist into the air, “In this world there are thousands of Bertas! There are thousands of Bertas worldwide!”^[51] The crowd cheers, thrusting their fists into the air. Laura Zúñiga Cáceres, Cáceres daughter, addressed mourners at her mother’s funeral, stating that the true injustice is that “Indigenous people are marginalized and deprived of their land.”^[52] She told the people that her mother cannot be murdered, “My mother can only be planted, to be born and reborn,” and by killing her, the murderers just made the resistance grow.^[53]

        Four years after her mother’s murder, Zúñiga Cáceres explained in a Democracy Now! interview why women were targeted by capitalistic powers. It is not just that they are environmental activists, it is also because they are women and the roles they play as women in their communities. Zúñiga Cáceres stated,

“Just like the land in our territory is violated and destroyed, so are our bodies, and that is something that is a constant in countries like Honduras. We know that we are at risk, we know that they kill us, that they rape us, they attack our families. I think it also has a lot to do with uprooting, with history, because it is women who safeguard history, and the way of managing natural resources, and when we are displaced or violated against, that social fabric is also broken and lost.”^[54]

        Women are the direct connection between the environment and the communities that live and depend on those environments. By killing them, the connection also dies. This is political femicide. Lakhani expands on this term and explains that in machismo cultures, women standing up to men can hurt their pride and pushes at the established patriarchal status quo, often leading to retribution. Miranda also agrees with Lakhani stating, “They didn’t just kill a defender, or an indigenous leader, or an environmentalist – they killed a woman who dared speak out against a patriarchal system.”^[55] To the women closest to Cáceres, her murder was not only because she pushed at the patriarchy and the capitalists, it was also because of what women stand for in Indigenous communities. Women are the connection between the community and nature; they are the keepers of knowledge and the tie of peoplehood to the environment.

Discussion of the Women of #NoDAPL and COPINH

         The purpose of researching this topic was to understand the connection between feminism and Indigenous American environmental activism. To start discussing my interpretations of this topic, I must be transparent about who I am. I am a non-Indigenous white woman who lives in the United States because of ancestral immigration from Europe. I did not grow up in a location that was knowledgeable about Indigenous worldviews. My current home sits on Cherokee ancestral homelands and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Qualla Boundary is only a short drive away. I have been able to converse and learn from Indigenous people in the surrounding towns of my new home and at Western Carolina University much more than in the locations of my early life. I have also had the opportunity to work in African nations and live in villages that are working on cultivating strategies to handle outside development of their lands. These experiences have put me on a path to understand what colonialism has done to Indigenous peoples and how capitalism affects not only their communities, but all communities, concerning the environment and human well-being.

           My interest in this research started with Berta Cáceres. Listening to her speak about environmentalism and feminist ideology made me want to understand more of how other Indigenous women incorporated these philosophies into their activism in the Americas. I did not know the Water Protectors were founded by women until reading Feminism of the 99% in a section about the ecological crisis and Indigenous people’s resistance. However, I was aware of the #NoDAPL movement when it was happening in 2016 and 2017 and even donated to the cause years back. Realizing women were at the forefront of the movement made me want to know more, so I selected this case to be compared to Cáceres and COPINH. One can imagine my surprise while watching a Standing Rock press conference, already having decided to analyze these two cases, to see a picture of Berta Cáceres being held by a woman, explaining that they stand in solidarity with Cáceres’ cause. This was more connection than I bargained for.

         There is an awareness shared by these women in the selected case studies that they are part of a global resistance; a resistance by all colonized peoples against the modern-day implementation of globalization and capitalism. They know that because they are marginalized communities, they are consequently indispensable to the financial or governmental powers that be. Also, they are aware of an ideology that makes them seem like they have vanished from existence, and that the original European colonial powers and modern development have already handled and defeated them. This is perpetuated by citizens and politicians in their countries not acknowledging their existence. Their social movements reverse this assumption and bring awareness to the non-Indigenous that they are still very much a part of the land and the country in which they live.

         Focusing on feminism and environmentalism, these women recognize that state development for capitalistic gain and resource extraction leads to violence against women, and violence against the Earth. The Indigenous women in both the United States and Honduras claim they have a responsibility for defending their environment and their communities because the two are interdependent. In both cases, the worldviews of the Sioux and Lenca place women at the center of knowledge incorporated with sacred waters. When women are removed from the equation, when they are deemed unimportant by the patriarchy, the peoplehood of a community is also ignored. These women see human rights violations happening to themselves and to their families and communities, they also see these violations to their non-human relatives, like rivers, within their environment that are inseparable from their identity. Their activism is not just for the sake of the preservation of the environment, it is for the preservation of themselves. In the words of LaDonna Bravebull Allard, “Water is female, water is us, we have to protect the water,” and “If we stop protecting the water, we die.”[56]

 

[1] Luana Ross, “From the ‘F’ Word to Indigenous/Feminisms,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no.2 (Fall 2009): 39-52.

[2] Sarah A. Nickel, “‘I Am Not a Women’s Liber Although Sometimes I Sound Like One’: Indigenous Feminism and Politicized Motherhood,” American Indian Quarterly 41, no.4, (Fall 2017): 299-335.

[3] Nickel, “Motherhood,” 302.

[4] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, (New York: HarperOne, 1983), originally published in 1980.

[5] Merchant, Nature, xxi.

[6] Ibid., xx, emphasis by Merchant.

[7] Kate Shanley, “Thoughts on Indian Feminism,” in Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, ed. Beth Brant (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988), 213-215; also see Luana Ross, “Indigenous/Feminisms.”

[8] Shanley, “Thoughts,” 214, emphasis in original.

[9] Leslie Kern, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World, (London and New York: Verso, 2020), Kindle.

[10] Kern, Feminist City, location 163, Kindle.

[11] Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, (London and New York: Verso, 2020), Kindle.

[12] Arruzza et. al., 99%, location 429, Kindle.

[13] Ibid., location 429, Kindle.

[14] Ibid., location 310, Kindle.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., location 531, Kindle.

[17] Ibid., location 481, Kindle.

[18] Ibid., location 103, Kindle.

[19] Ibid., location 481, Kindle.

[20] Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, (London and New York: Verso, 2019); and see Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, editors, Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

[21] Estes, Our History, 14.

[22] Estes, Our History, and see LucidLorax, “Dakota Access Pipeline Blockage Update,” YouTube video, 4:37, September 11, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFqxZ8ncMSw&feature=emb_logo, accessed from #NoDAPL Archive https://www.nodaplarchive.com/interviews.html.

[23] Estes Our History, 25.

[24] Ibid., 15.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Meredith Privott, “An Ethos of Responsibility and Indigenous Women Water Protectors in the #NoDAPL Movement,” The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 2019, 74-100: 74.

[27] Tom Jefferson, “Standing Rock Press Conference,” YouTube video, 1:00:27, October 5, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TKj-3Xibg8, 30:00, accessed from #NoDAPL Archive https://www.nodaplarchive.com/interviews.html; also see Nick Estes, “‘They Took Our Footprint Out of the Ground:’ An Interview with LaDonna Bravebull Allard,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, eds. Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon: 43-55.

[28] “Standing Rock Press Conference,” 13:50.

[29] Jaskiran Dhillon, “‘This Fight Has Become My Life, and It’s Not Over:’ An Interview with Zaysha Grinnell,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, eds. Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon: 21-23.

[30] Dhillon, “An Interview with Zaysha Grinnell,” 22.

[31] “Standing Rock Press Conference,” 35:12.

[32] Dhillon, “An Interview with Zaysha Grinnell,” 21.

[33] “Standing Rock Press Conference,” 5:30.

[34] “Standing Rock Press Conference,” 4:00 and 38:20.

[35] Nina Lakhani, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 40.

[36] Frontline Defenders, “Berta Cáceres – Guardiana de los Ríos,” YouTube video, 12:46, April 13, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btbMI2VT_AQ, 11:03.

[37] Lakhani, Berta, 38.

[38] Ibid., 39.

[39] Ibid., 41; and see Frontline Defenders, “Berta Cáceres – Guardiana de los Ríos.”

[40] Lakhani, Berta, 13.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Goldman Environmental Prize, “Berta Caceres acceptance speech, 2015 Goldman Prize ceremony,” YouTube video, 3:19, April 22, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR1kwx8b0ms, 0:38.

[43] Goldman Environmental Prize, 1:35.

[44] Skylight, “Berta Cáceres: In Her Own Words,” YouTube video, 3:15, September 22, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjM81tYBew4, and see accompanying website https://skylight.is/2016/03/berta-caceres-in-her-own-words/.

[45] Skylight, “Berta Cáceres: In Her Own Words,” 0:35.

[46] Frontline Defenders, “Interview with Berta Cáceres, Hondoras (2014),” YouTube video, 3:19, May 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8uxD47tvEI, 0:11.

[47] Frontline Defenders, “Berta Cáceres – Guardiana de los Ríos,” 3:23.

[48] Ibid., 10:17.

[49] Ibid., 10:37.

[50] Hammer Museum, “Berta Vive: Berta Cáceres and the Fight for Indigenous Water Rights,” YouTube video, 1:49:18, October 29, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7kbg3W_n9Y, 7:30; also see Lakhani, Berta, for more information about Pascualita.

[51] Hammer Museum, “Berta Vive: Berta Cáceres and the Fight for Indigenous Water Rights,” 14:00; and see Lakhani, Berta, for more information about Miranda.

[52] Hammer Museum, “Berta Vive: Berta Cáceres and the Fight for Indigenous Water Rights,” 5:15.

[53] Ibid.; and see Terco Producciones, “BERTA VIVE trailer,” Vimeo video, 2:22, February 19, 2017, https://vimeo.com/204743033, 1:44.

[54] Democracy Now!, “4 Years Seeking Justice: Daughter of Slain Indigenous Environmental Leader Berta Cáceres Speaks Out,” YouTube video, 19:49, January 17, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ2DYlr1IfM&t=122s, 14:54.

[55] Lakhani, Berta, 146-148.

[56] Tom Jefferson, “Standing Rock Press Conference,” 30:00.