ROCK AND
A HARD PLACE
nowhere are the tensions so acute
as on the hardscrabble reservations that either sit atop valuable
coal — an estimated 30 percent
of U.S. coal reserves west of the
Mississippi are located on native
lands — or lie in the path of the
trains that would haul it to port.
Just outside the walls of the
longhouse where Washines and
his fellow drummers were singing
out in opposition to the coal shipments, a 22-foot totem pole lay on
the bed of a white truck. The carving, which depicted five salmon,
two kneeling men and a hungry
child, was touring towns, churches
and reservations across the Pacific
Northwest as part of an effort to
consolidate tribal opposition to
the proposed coal shipments. (The
totem’s last stop, in late September, would be across the border in
the Tsleil-Waututh Nation of British Columbia, where it now stands
erected as a display of solidarity
with that tribe’s parallel struggle
over a tar sands oil pipeline.)
“Mother Earth doesn’t have a
voice,” said Karen Jim Whitford, a
tribal elder, as she stepped shoeless into the center of the longhouse floor. A couple of her tears
disappeared into the dirt. “So we
must speak for her.”
HUFFINGTON
02.09.14
“I vote we stand up,” exclaimed
another elder, Lorintha Umtuch,
referring to the totem’s symbolic
call for Native Americans to get
off their knees and “Warrior Up!”
for future generations. “Indian
people need to stop this, or else
corporations will trample us.”
Not all tribes stand on the same
side of the coal-export battle line.
CJ Stewart, a senator of the Crow
Nation, said in a phone interview
in October that his tribe desperately needs to develop its coal
reserves to improve its economic
“We rely on coal just as they
rely on salmon. All tribes share
one common enemy, and that
enemy is poverty.”
fortunes and lift its people out of
poverty. In November, the Crow
Nation signed a joint resolution
with the Navajo Nation in support
of each other’s coal development.
“We rely on coal just as they rely
on salmon,” Stewart said, referring to the Yakama and other
tribes represented in Celilo. “All
tribes share one common enemy,
and that enemy is poverty.”
Many tribes along the rail corridor, however, feel it’s not just
livelihoods at stake — it’s lives.