Category: Cornplanter

Indians and Environmentalists

This before election results are in, knowing that one candidate thinks climate change is a hoax, and that neither candidate has acknowledged Indian efforts at stopping the Dakota Access pipeline—or, for that matter, having talked at all to Indians or about Indian issues and concerns.

There are three pieces in today’s New York Times that reflect advances and show the need to continue Alvin Josephy’s long-ago efforts at bringing the environmental community and Indian communities together.

The first of course is about the environmental community backing the Indians at Standing Rock in their fight to stop the Dakota Access pipeline by targeting big banks that are financing the project (perfect roles for such groups). The second and third articles—and a closer look might have revealed more—were about the smog in Delhi, India, which is literally choking the population with industrial overload, and another about oil companies, that, to varying degrees and seeking to serve their own best economic self interests, are exploring alternative energies. Good for them.

In ancient days, when David Brower was the head of the Sierra Club, Alvin said that his and other environmental organizations paid no attention and lent not a helping hand as a high-minded hell-bent-for-development Army Corps of Engineers

“built the Garrison Dam, the largest rolled-earth am in the world, across the Missouri River in North Dakota, ignoring the protests of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians and chopping up and flooding sacred sites and large parts of their reservation. Repeating their high-handedness, the Corps then broke the American government’s oldest existing treaty, made in 1794 with the Seneca Indians of New York State, to build the Kinzua Dam, which flooded the center of the Senecas’ reservation and the burial ground of their famous revolutionary-era chief, Cornplanter, and again forced a heartbreaking relocation of most of the Indians.” (Walk Toward Oregon, pp 275-76)

Weed, California

There were other disagreements, and other cases where environmental groups disregarded issues in Grand Canyon and in Alaska, but Josephy insisted that the two sides should be talking, wrote an op-ed about it in the Times, and actually arranged a New York meeting between Brower, Alan Gassow, and others from Friends of the Earth with tribal leaders. Ultimately, he wrote several articles for Audubon Magazine and a book, Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, which gathered essays and arguments on many of these issues. They are as fresh today as when he wrote them in the 70s and 80s–Kinzua’s still there; the Indians are ahead at Pyramid Lake and on the Columbia, and controversy swirls in the Dakotas.

I told my OSU class in La Grande yesterday about canaries in coal-mines, and how Indian concerns over natural resource issues, especially over water issues, might be seen in the same way. Dakota Access is not the only water issue out there today. Look to see what is happening on the Navajo Reservation with drought and pollution, and the efforts of Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead to tap Indian water in other places.

There is plenty of work to do—from Standing Rock to Delhi—but good environmentally conscious citizens might look close to home for the Indian tribes and their canaries and see where they are pointing.

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Alvin Josephy, Cornplanter, and the Kinzua Dam

Sorry for the long time between Josephy Library blog postings. Now that kids are back in school, I plan to get back with some kind of regularity!
Did anyone hear the recent NPR interview with the Seneca Nation’s new president, Robert Odawi Porter? I had been digging through Josephy speeches and writings looking towards an anthology of his work that is still relevant today. And looking especially at articles and speeches that had to do with environmental issues. Alvin came to these concerns through Indians, of course. I remember him saying that he first learned that Peabody Coal was strip mining coal and wreaking havoc on Hopi and Navajo lands in the southwest—and went on to see the havoc that the strip mining and coal fire emissions were wreaking on everyone in the Southwest.
But back to the Seneca. The NPR interview sent me to Alvin’s December 1968 piece in American Heritage Magazine, “Cornplanter Can You Swim,” republished in Now That the Buffalo’s Gone in 1982. After two decades of Indian opposition, the Kinzua Dam had been built in 1965. Villages had been condemned, houses had been burned, and the remains of 300 Seneca Indians, including Chief Cornplanter—Alvin had a great talent with titles—had been moved by the Army Corps of Engineers to higher ground so that thousands of acres of Indian Lands could be inundated by the Alleghany Reservoir. The Corps was also running over, or abrogating, the oldest active treaty agreed to by the United States of America, one signed by Cornplanter and 58 other Seneca sachems and chiefs in 1794!
Fast forward to 2011, and a new Seneca Chief with a Harvard law degree, to a Seneca nation made wealthy by three casinos and a thriving tobacco business, and then to 2015, when a 50 year lease on the Kinzua Dam expires (the dam provides power to Pittsburgh!). Chief—or President—Porter thinks the Senecas should run the dam, and he and his tribe are marshalling their legal forces to make the case. I don’t know whether Alvin’s early work will be part of the case—but maybe….
And here is the link to the NPR interview. Googling Kinzua Dam and Seneca will get you much more.
p.s. For the Southwest, check “Murder of the Southwest,” Audubon Magazine, July 1971, and “The Hopi Way,” American Heritage Magazine, February 1973.