Towards Collective Liberation
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Credit: The Red Nation
Just three years ago, Indigenous water protectors and their allies faced tear gas on Thanksgiving for defending sacred land from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Today, Indigenous lives, land, and the right to defend the environment remain under attack.
This November, we call attention to Indigenous political prisoners, including Standing Rock protesters and American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier, and the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) risking imprisonment to defend their sacred Mauna Kea from development. We also note the broader attacks against Indigenous people working to protect our environment.
More than 400 years after the first European settlement of Turtle Island, Palestine Legal acknowledges that the territory on which we live is the product of ongoing settler colonialism, racial and religious supremacy. We understand Israel to be the product of these same forces.
Because the injustices our communities face are interrelated, the contemporary attacks on Indigenous activism, Palestinian rights, and on Black and Brown lives cannot be separated. That’s why we’re are proud to support those working towards justice in Palestine, to stand alongside Black and Indigenous advocates fighting for justice on Turtle Island, and to build strategies for legal support across movements.
Last week, Wisconsin became the tenth U.S. state to adopt a “critical infrastructure bill” that makes protesting oil and gas pipelines a felony crime. These bills – pushed by the rightwing legislative factory ALEC – are in direct response to movements like #NoDAPL, just as the anti-boycott bills it’s pushing aim to suppress the growing movement for Palestinian rights.
Credit: The Red Nation
Palestine Legal has joined Black, Indigenous, and environmental justice movement lawyers and activists to speak about the intersectionality of our oppression and cross-solidarity efforts, including on a panel last month.
We spoke alongside The Red Nation in Albuquerque in January about how we can keep our movements safe from the intensifying repression. And we recently joined a convening of Palestine solidarity, Indigenous, Black, environmental justice, and immigration justice groups in service of stronger organizing towards our collective liberation.
We are proud of the many movement organizations that we’ve worked with or supported that are advocating for collective justice. The Red Nation adopted a formal position of Palestine solidarity this fall in addition to producing The Red Deal—a call to action to divest from fossil fuels, police, and military occupation and to invest in healing people and the planet.
The Palestinian Youth Movement has organized delegations of Palestinians to Standing Rock in 2016 and South Africa in 2019, and led an Indigenous delegation to Palestine last year. This kind of organizing is happening around the country.
With our lives at stake, we are grateful for the countless individuals and organizations, building bridges between movements and doing the urgent work needed for us to live in a free world.
The Red Nation is volunteer-run and operates solely on donations. Support their work to build a future rooted in liberation for Native peoples.
Credit: Haithem El-Zabri with creative help from Palestinian youth movement