Climate Activists: “We Are in a Fight for Our Lives”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And back to the climate now, the father and daughter duo, Chase and Tokata Iron Eyes became central to the 2016 protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil through the Dakotas, as well as Iowa and Illinois. It’s currently under investigation for potential environmental harm. And here they are speaking with Hari Sreenivasan about how their nation’s demonstrations moved the dial and why their fight for indigenous justice continues.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Chase Iron Eyes, Tokata Iron Eyes, thanks so much for joining us. First, I want to give people a background. Chase, I think might have been familiar with you, if they are, with what happened with the Dakota Access Pipeline and the protests that were taking place there years ago. And you, at a point, were facing six years in prison for this. And I just — if you can encapsulate why was it so important for you to take that stand at that time.

CHASE IRON EYES, CO-DIRECTOR, LAKOTA PEOPLE’S LAW PROJECT: Thank you. And very good morning to everybody. My is Chase We Iron Eyes. We were living in what is now, you know, Morton County, in Derby (ph) Country, these are the site of the governments, of the law enforcement agencies that inflicted great violence against unarmed water protectors, unarmed Standing Rock nationalist, just four to five years ago. And I was bearing witness to, I was on the ground giving myself to this cause because we at Standing Rock were trying to mind our own business. And then, here comes Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer Partners, big extractive, highly militarized industrial complex comes to my front door and says, look, Mr. Indian and your children, you are to longer going to live in peace. I am here to disturb your peace. We’re going to violate your territorial integrity as the nation, as a Sioux nation, as the Standing Rock, the Oceti Sakowin, they came with violence to put this pipeline in our territory without our free prior and informed consent. So, we were just defending ourselves. And the rest of the world stood with us. Tens of thousands of people came and stood with us on the ground. They gave of their time, their energy, their earning potentials, their liberties, their freedoms, everybody recognizes that we are in a fight for our lives, we are in a fight for our birth rights, our natural rights, our constitutional rights, and for indigenous nations, our treaty rights. We find ourselves continuously at the forefront of the fight against eco collapse. We are literally trying to save and redeem all of humanity. So, I had no chance but to defend what was right there.

SREENIVASAN: Tokata, I want to ask why was it important for you to be there and make your choice heard?

TOKATA IRON EYES, INDIGENOUS YOUTH CLIMATE ACTIVIST: Yes, when I was at the protest, I was 13. So, 12 years old the pipeline project had been proposed. And essentially, what had happened is these relatives of ours had come into the school to tell us the effects of the pipeline and just about how long it would take to get into the water systems of our community if it were to break. And it was something like five minutes to get into the most immediate community next to the project. It was something like 10 minutes to spread to the school system, 15 to get to the whole community. Here is somebody telling you you’re about to be in a state of emergency where you’re unsure if you have clean drinking water. And so, it seemed pretty obvious, pretty clear to us that something needed to be done. And it was important for me just to understand the gravity of what it meant to pick up your own voice and use it a as a tool, as an indigenous person, as an indigenous woman, these things are radical acts. And they are carrying on the legacies of hundreds of years of anticolonial resistance and we are only continuing the work forward.

SREENIVASAN: Chase, at the time, there were moments where there were dogs sicked on the protesters. There was water being sprayed on people when it was 20 degrees out knowing that it could make people hypothermic. While you’re standing there through this, did you think that the outcome would be what it was?

C. IRON EYES: When you’re there on the front line in front of deadly attack dogs, which are use of deadly force by legal definition, when you’re there, like on November 20th and you’re witnessing national guard, private military contractors, county police, municipal law enforcement deliberately and recklessly endangering the lives of unarmed water protectors by the hundreds by spraying them with water in 26 — 24-degree temperatures in the frigid Dakotas, you understand there’s a line. There’s a line that we are expected to confine ourselves within in. In consumer culture, in extractive consumer culture, it is extremely important that the world never forget what happened at Standing Rock because what at Standing Rock is being carried out right now at COP26. People are calling for justice. We’re calling for climate justice. And also, the climate is calling for justice in her own regard. So, for me to have to face six years of imprisonment for my daughter to have to be surveilled by a private military contractors, tracking her every movement, where she’s flying to, who she’s speaking with, these are aspects of an impending fight, an ongoing fight for our rights to free speech, our rights to peacefully assemble, our rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures and big tech surveillance. Fascism of in all of its forms cannot be accepted by the American people, by our people. We simply it’s too much to give.

SREENIVASAN: Tokata, take us sort of from what you learned in Standing Rock and in the pipelines and the protests and how you see that translating to this larger use movement sticking up for the climate and trying to hold people with power to account.

T. IRON EYES: I learned a lot at Standing Rock. That — like specifically being right that — like we were never alone in the fight. And that actually, it wasn’t only the fossil fuel industry, it was an entire system. Like learning that your enemy actually doesn’t have like a singular name or face and accepting right that — like you are battling an industry in and of itself, something that is like completely almost intangible, incomprehensible and then, deciding that you’re going to do it any way. And like it comes at great risk. I mean, I was 13 years old. I had no idea about the consequences of what it would mean to become a voice for a movement like this in any capacity. And yes, taking it like two COP26, I’m not going to COP26 because I’m taking 18 credits right now. I genuinely cannot be forced to make a decision between my education as a college student and between my future as a global citizen. Neither of those things are negotiable. And to see that there are hundreds upon hundreds of young activists who are taking time out of their lives, already fully like scheduled and booked to go to this conference, right, where people are being denied access to the meetings that really count, where people are acting like this is a choice. This is not a choice. COP — like COP26 — like listen to that in and of itself, this thing has happened 26 times and we are still where we are, 26 times. And I was thinking about that in trying to make my decision if I’m going to go to COP and something that kept coming back to me is that there will be another one next year. And that’s [bleep] crushing.

SREENIVASAN: Chase, I want to ask, are you, I don’t know if the word is optimistic or hopeful, but what do you think can be accomplished at these conversations, especially in the context of indigenous voices from not just the United States throughout America but around the world and how they are represented at the table, so to speak, where these decisions are happening?

C. IRON EYES: I think that the human species is in a very vulnerable and teachable moment. Partly because we’re now in appreciation, in growing appreciation and cognizance of the human species’ role in collapsing our ecology. That is something that the human species has accomplished in a very short order, but it’s not because this is what we want. It is because the petrol chemical extractive giants that determine the foreign and energy policy of nation states have not listened to indigenous nations. We have been trying, for all of my childhood, for all of my father and my mother’s lives, they have fought, bled for and died for indigenous liberation. The descendants and the relatives of Berta Caceres and the thousands of people who have been murdered, you know, in our country we get surveilled, we get threatened with six years in prison. In other countries, people get murdered. We need justice for all of those ecological protectors, we need consequences. We are the only people, the only agents of change who can push for this. Our elected leaders are going to listen to what’s happening in the streets, what’s happening with tribal nations, what happens at line three, what happened at Standing Rock, our entire country almost burned to the ground when George Floyd was murdered. This is indicative that the social contract, the terms under which humans are willing to live, you know, the contours of what economic justice looks like, what social justice looks like, racial justice, all of those are negotiable right now. So, I am completely encouraged because once you liberate, once you make progress, evolutionary progress, there is no going back to whatever you just came from. And Standing Rock changed global consciousness on that level. We’re seeing the results of that. COP26, it is useful for what it is. President Biden is there. John Kerry is there. Grassroots indigenous organizations and people as well as organizations like the American Congress of American Indians are representing our perspective on a global scale. At home, Deb Haaland has been named the first cabinet level secretary, the first indigenous woman to be named to a level of — to a position of that magnitude. So, I am 100 percent encouraged. We don’t have a choice as humanity. We’ve got to change the way that we operate. The way that we walk in our lives.

SREENIVASAN: Tokata, I want to also ask you, as a young indigenous woman, about the mass graves that we found in North America, in schools and what happened. And I wonder as you’re learning about the world right now, do you connect all these different dots about what’s happening with the climate right now, what happened to your ancestors, what’s happening to your peers?

T. IRON EYES: Learning about the mass graves in Canada like while being in school in Massachusetts has been something that like I have — like I have really no idea how I reckon with it. What does it mean to commit yourself to an institution that was once used as a tool of genocide against your people? The same curriculum, the same histories, the same maps, right, that like those children were looking at, I’m still referencing. And the people around us are willfully ignorant, willfully quiet about that violence. And it has continued for so long. And so, when I think about all of those it bodies who have yet to be found, all of those bodies who have already been uncovered, I give thanks but I truly feel that I am carrying on the work of those human beings who didn’t get a chance to see it through in their own lives. Yes. No, it’s completely a generational fight and I think that’s also why joy is so important. Recognizing that every piece of you has already been lived in somebody else in our grandmothers and that all of those children were having the same thoughts that I am while I’m in school. And yes, I just — I want to be able to carry that legacy in a really important way and that work is desperately needed right now.

SREENIVASAN: Chase, what’s it like to watch your daughter carry on this mantle of your work? Are you putting too much on her shoulders?

C. IRON EYES: I would say that sometimes it’s too heavy. But I also know that this is our responsibility. I know I was born in 1978 and that the imposition of the reservation era was the time of my grandfather. I know that it what we call history, how we ended up in the situations that we are all in today is not ancient. I know that lies are being told in our institutions, of education, of media, of law, of politics. And I know that we are standing on the shoulders of giants who died, who bled, who sacrificed for us to be free, for us to voice the substance of their lives. And I know that that responsibility is not liked. I know that Tokata had to grow up way too soon. I know that her mother moved us back to the reservation for a reason. And I have unshakable strength and knowledge in our purpose, we have been spending a lot of our lives, a lot of our energy building bridges to those outside of the indigenous world view who know intrinsically, who know in their hearts, in their minds that we have to seek a different path on this earth that life is too short to just go along with extractive consumer culture. We see the imbalance. We feel it. We can’t deny it. And indigenous nations are here with their hands open and their arms open saying, let’s come together and let’s begin to heal.

SREENIVASAN: Chase Iron Eyes, Tokata Iron Eyes, thank you both for your time.

C. IRON EYES: Thank you very much.