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By Jacqueline Keeler / I ndian Country Today Media Network On Monday, February 29, nearly two months after armed militants took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the Burns Paiute Tribe was finally allowed to visit it. The refuge is their ancient wintering grounds and filled with culturally-sensitive sites and even burial grounds of their ancestors. On Thursday, 14 more militia members were arrested, including two more members of the Bundy family who led the armed standoffs in Oregon and Nevada against federal authorities. ...

Counterpunch — Police Intimidation from Dalton Trumbo to Deep Green Resistance January 12th, 2015 Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security agents have contacted more than a dozen members of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), a radical environmental group, including one of its leaders, Lierre Keith, who said she has been the subject of two visits from the FBI at her home. The FBI’s most recent contact with a DGR member occurred Jan. 8 when two FBI agents visited Rachael “Renzy” Neffshade at her home in Pittsburgh, Pa. The FBI agents began the visit by asking her questions about a letter she had sent several months earlier to Marius Mason, an environmental activist who was sentenced in 2009 to almost 22 years in prison for arson and property damage. ...

In the Great Basin, refugees beget refugees. European settlers who physically performed the most destructive jobs were in many cases refugees from war and economic crisis in their homelands. My ancestors, the Irish, endured centuries of British domination and a wave of Irish fled starvation when the Great Famine struck Ireland a few years before the Great Basin was settled. Many Irish were involved in building railroads and in mining in Nevada. Richer European settlers – the mining bosses and ranch owners – possessed too much capital to be thought of as refugees in the traditional sense, but they demonstrated a certain spiritual disease produced by the belief that humans can safely take more from the land than the land freely gives. ...

It was a typical scene for many on the Tohono O’odham Nation: a Border Patrol agent pulled behind us in a green-striped vehicle after we had stopped to check directions. We were a group of five people in two cars. We had no idea what they wanted. Documentary filmmaker Adam Markle was going to interview tribal member Joshua Garcia at the San Miguel border gate, only a mile away. It was October 12, Columbus Day, a fitting date to be on the land of the Tohono O’odham. ...

This article, from Will Falk of DGR Great Basin (and photographed by Max Wilbert), looks further at the issue Piñon Pine and Juniper forest destruction that is rapidly becoming a campaign focus of DGR members and allies in the region. “Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.” ...

The Castle Rock Prairie Dogs are Gone: Open Letter from an Exile By Jennifer Murnan, DGR Colorado I wore this shirt, long-sleeved, multi-patterned, funky, well tailored hand-me-down for almost every day I worked on the prairie dog relocation at the “Promenade” site in Castle Rock Colorado. The “Promenade” site was only that in the avaricious life-sucking minds of the capitalist pig developers. The “site” was really a scrap of prairie community, a last survivor already lacerated by monstrous earth movers, surrounded by apartments, highway, box stores, a mall, parking lots—anti-life. ...

Editors note: this article from Deep Green Resistance member and slam poet world champ Dominique Christina was published recently in the wake of the latest mass shooting in Virginia. In the piece, Dominique reflects on the media treatment of different cases: they make the killing of white people into tragedies (which they are), but don’t do the same to the killings of black women and men. Instead, these killings are fetishized and viewed over and over again without consideration for the family and friends of the victims. This is not a new tradition in America; lynchings were often public events in the South. Bring your kids, bring a picnic. It’s a sensation, and it reflects how white supremacy is still the ruling law of this land, and how people of color are still not viewed as fully human inside this system. We invite you to read Dominique’s piece and reflect on her words. ...

Will Falk is a Deep Green Resistance member who has spent much of the past year assisting indigenous resistance movements at the Unist’ot’en Camp and, more recently, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In this article, he speaks to the dangerous powers that come from the science of the dominant culture (civilization). Many view the debate surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope’s proposed construction on Mauna Kea and Kanaka Maolis’ opposition to it as fundamentally a question of science versus culture. On the benign end, the word “science” has come to connote something close to cool and objective rationality – nothing more nor less than a collection of knowledge to be used in man’s (isn’t it always “man’s”?) noble aim to transcend nature. More malevolently, however, pitting science against indigenous culture is nothing more than insidious racism. This racism operates on the often unchallenged claim that science is an inherently western way of knowing and therefore superior to indigenous ways of knowing. ...

This article, by Deep Green Resistance member Mary Lou Singleton, was recently published on Counterpunch. It deals with the topic of gender: a controversial subject that has led to DGR members being deplatformed, blacklisted, and threatened. But the hype is just that. As this post demonstrates, gender-critical positions are compassionate and have roots in a material analysis of feminism and patriarchy.

The great musician Lauren Hill once said, “Fantasy is what people want but reality is what they need.” And the reality is that the climate movement is failing. See this graph? That’s a measure of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere from 2005 to mid-2015. The trend is up. That means we’re losing. Until that trend is heading steeply in the other direction, we’re in trouble. ...