Three Ecologies, Dos Republicas, and One Thorough Reflection on Organizing

On April 27, an intergenerational crowd of 200 indigenous people and their allies marched along nine miles to protest the proposed Dos Republicas mine. Tane Ward, with the Sierra Club’s National Organizing Department, is the organizer who helped build the coalition, described how the event first came together.

“Last year the Army Corp of Engineers met in Eagle Pass, Texas, and I traveled there with another activist,” recalled Ward. “There were other indigenous people there, six natives who traveled down from different parts of the state and beyond -- like the Comanche from Oklahoma, a 12-hour drive -- to speak out against the Dos Republicas Mine.”

The Dos Republicas coal mine is a cross-border operation between the United States and Mexico where the proposed expansion in Eagle Pass, Texas will feed coal to one of the most polluting plants in the hemisphere. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality recently approved an expanded wastewater permit which would allow the mine to increase discharge into the Rio Grande via Elm Creek, so as to accelerate extraction. The TCEQ’s green light came despite protests from residents, indigenous groups, and local politicians confronting a colossal challenge: cross-border economic activity.

Facilitated by trade deals like NAFTA, the Dos Republicas sits mine on what is ostensibly within US borders to extract coal to feed a power plant ostensibly within Mexican borders -- “ostensibly” since the aim of NAFTA is to deterritorialize borders to facilitate the flow of capital between member states while restricting the flow of bodies between them.

“Unsurprisingly, native groups were opposed, but I did not realize it was so far-reaching,” continues Ward. “They recognized the land as sacred land that had to be protected.”

If the resistance to the mine at Eagle Pass is far-reaching, it is merely a dialectical response to the far-reaching and dense corporate ecosystem of which the Eagle Pass mine is but a minuscule part. Dos Republicas, for instance, is part of the US component of a Mexican company, Minera del Norte, which owns other components in Mexico and Israel. “Owns” is a bit of an exaggeration, as Minera del Norte is itself a subsidiary of Coahuila-based steel conglomerate AHMSA, which has other subsidiaries like AHMSA International sprouting up in San Antonio.

The web becomes more intricate as it becomes more opaque, as AHMSA is not an independent company, either, but rather, according to SNL Financial, yet another subsidiary of its “Ultimate Parent” company, Grupo Acerero del Norte. No further information on SNL exists for this company, but their website suggests it, too, is part of another consortium, Grupo Fonderia.

Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies described such an entangled, murky global network as “Integrated World Capitalism,” in which sites of power are decentered and deterritorialized with no clear beginning or end. Three Ecologies was published in 1989, the year before Mexican elites, to conform to NAFTA’s demands, undid two key achievements of the 1917 revolution: subsoil mineral rights for Mexican landowners and the ejido, land allotments for indigenous people in Mexico. This deal and others like it (CAFTA, TTIP, TPP), in allowing companies to plunder land and wealth worldwide, creates the types of intricate global networks that Guattari describes, with devastating consequences to people for the sake of profit. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco hid behind a wall of polite jargon the effects they knew would come out of these NAFTA reforms:

“A recent change that has received little attention in the U.S. -- but which may ultimately have important effects -- is Mexico's restructuring of its agricultural land tenure policies. This restructuring likely will lead to increased consolidation of farming into larger, more efficient units, and to significant movement of the Mexican workforce out of agriculture and into other sectors... The expected decline in the rural population may boost the availability of low-cost labor in the short run. Potentially large dislocations of rural Mexicans could lead to larger than normal immigration to the U.S., because other Mexican industries have limited short-term capabilities to absorb the displaced peasants.”

What this means is that NAFTA facilitated the colonization of indigenous lands in Mexico so that American corporations like Monsanto could form modern day encomiendas while disguising this reform and revival of a late-medieval institution as ‘development.’ The result, as was predicted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is the “significant movement” -- polite discourse for mass displacement (ethnic cleansing) -- of indigenous farmers into “other sectors” which put downward pressure on Mexican wages.

This drop in wages made it even more profitable to outsource factories from north to south as NAFTA pits North American labor markets against themselves. Though Monsanto’s skillful propaganda would have one think this process is “progress,” the consequences have been simmering over time. Waves of migration and displacement pushed refugees of this colonization process to follow the plundered wealth to Mexico’s urban areas or all the way north to the United States. Once here, agricultural corporations could then exploit incoming refugees for cheap farm labor, or hoteliers and middle-class Americans could exploit for domestic labor, etc. At the same time, commerce between the states facilitated the existence of cross-border operations like the Dos Republicas mine.

Ward describes what informs his organizing and why it’s important to build broad networks that answer tit for tat the challenges we face every day, and it includes finding the closest thing to a node that facilitates this pattern of well-disguised violence, a node around which people can rally and which they can oppose.

“The state represents extractors, not people, whether native or ‘simply local,’” said Ward. “We see that it helps explain to us why things got to where they are, there has been a long history of people having their decision-making power taken from them, what kind of economies to build, what water quality should be, what language is spoken in these areas, who has access to land -- all have been taken from native peoples of Texas for generations.”

The determination of indigenous peoples to defend the sacred value attached to land use rallied a large group of people in the region. Among the tribes represented on April 27 were the Pacuache-Coahuiltecan, Carrizo-Comecrudo, Lipan Apache, Cherokee, Mexica/Nahua, Kickapoo, and Comanche -- a stunning presence made all the more remarkable given the success of Texas’ thorough genocide of all of its indigenous inhabitants. Today no Indian tribes remain who are both federally recognized and can claim Texas as ancestral territory.

To be fair, settler-colonists, like those from the United States, also claim the same land for possessing values sacred to its own civilization. But whereas the land’s sacredness among the indigenous brings together a shared history between land and people, as well as respect for the mutual relationship between people and the indomitable power of creation, for settler-colonists, the land’s sacredness relates to its being a reliquary for profit begging for extraction.

But the process by which American civilization maintains the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples within its political borders cannot be simply reduced to what we already recognize as its most obvious tools, such as the slow-wrought ethnic cleansing of reservations or boarding schools, or the flash-point violence of massacres like those at Wounded Knee. The question remains, then, how do colonial-settlers mask historical and ongoing material violence? How does one rationalize to oneself that that is “in the past” and not “ongoing”? The stakes here are higher than mere intellectualizing since it is this process by which we allow ourselves to coexist with genocide as if nothing happened -- and continues to happen.

“Epistemic violence: separated by land, separated from culture, the power to control the land and the people, it’s all held by a small group of elites who use whatever divisions they can,” said Ward. “We’re mostly focusing on unifying people right now for us to get our house in order.”

Just as one would not be satisfied with consulting a dictionary to find the definition of ‘appendix’ if one is beset by dull, spreading pain in the abdomen, processes like violence should not be limited to such spurious investigations. Such commonsense definitions obscure the dynamism of violence and the various forms it can take -- must take -- if its perpetrators are to succeed in their aims. Epistemic violence is a necessary precondition for there to be such a distinction as colonizer and colonized, and the way it is concealed in everyday practices makes it difficult to catch.

For the colonizers, be they Spanish, their Mexican successors, or by Americans, colonization always included an attempt to violently alienate the indigenous from their language, their customs, their practices, their history -- in short, depriving people of the ability to define themselves on their terms and in their language. This is epistemic violence. By eliminating indigenous ways of knowing and replacing them with Western ways of knowing, colonizers set the standards by which we define who gets to be, how they are to understand themselves, and how they are to be engaged with.

These big, violent ideas can show themselves in the smallest, most innocuous, even seemingly benign gestures.

“We have had so much difficulty dealing with things like disrespecting of our Native culture through appropriation, so we have to be careful when working with non-native environmental groups,” said Ward.

Westerners will often justify such appropriation as “respecting” or “sharing” by “taking part” in another culture, but they do so without stopping to consider the people who produce that culture, the violence required to relegate that culture as Other (and therefore, marketable), or considering how they define what they call, “respecting,” “sharing,” or “taking part.”

What these terms describe for each side, settler or indigenous, is not always, if ever, the same, and bridging the gap requires settlers think through the epistemic violence we rely on and relay when “sharing,” however “good” it might feel to one as an individual. When Westerners presume these values are shared and then impose that presupposition we are faced with an everyday example of epistemic violence, of removing from the indigenous their self-determination to assert their identity for the sake of a Western, transactional “sharing.”

That’s not to suggest settlers are irredeemable, but undoing the centuries of violence -- epistemic, economic, corporeal -- is going to take effort they may not be used to or effort that might not always “feel good,” for the process through which they engage in in this “sharing” comes from the Enlightenment.

Begun before they fled Germany as the rising tide of fascism threatened to submerge them both, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment embarked upon the still-timely task of “explain[ing] why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” For them, it was necessary to grapple with the ways in which Enlightenment values had matured into fascism, produced the concentration camp, and ended in Europe’s global self-obliteration between 1917 and 1945.

It was the first time in centuries that Westerners had presenced something like an eschaton for one of the holiest of their spiritual beliefs, that of infinite progress toward freedom and equality.   Adorno and Horkheimer, suddenly bereft of the social, political and economic stability necessary to indulge in such beliefs, began to seriously interrogate any and all of these presuppositions left to them -- and us -- by the ongoing period Westerners think of as ‘The Enlightenment.’

The high school summary of the Enlightenment, which prevails nationally in the form of a kind of political folk wisdom, goes something like this: Europeans ‘rediscovered’ texts and ideas from antiquity -- reason, logic, etc. -- and used these tools to dismantle the superstition that characterized “the Dark Ages” following the collapse of the Western Roman empire and the rise of the Church -- giving way to the Scientific Revolution -- and build new societies on more egalitarian and rational lines, such as those ideals ostensibly driving the American and French Revolutions.

Bracketing aside concerns about historical periodizations like ‘Dark Ages’ and the strategic exclusion of the Haitian Revolution -- history’s first successful slave revolt -- from standing alongside the French Revolution (their former slave masters) and the American Revolution (steered by slave-owning elites in part to preserve slavery and in part to get around the Proclamation Line of 1763 and extend their colonial settlements) as a striving for freedom and equality, what should seize our attention is the way these ideas of freedom and progress and the ‘good’ we attribute to them have transformed from flexible tools for inquiry and critique and have ossified into a secular version of St. Michael’s prayer, a repetition of words-of-order used to ward off detractors straining to pull from the Enlightenment’s totalitarian drive to extend its reach into anything and everything under the guise of “progress.”

But for those who lived outside of The Enlightenment’s reach, the end-of-the-world cataclysms that Adorno and Horkheimer fled had been a part of daily life for indigenous peoples since 1492.

This is one of the ways in which settlers can claim to be ‘nonviolent’ as their prosperity comes as a result of colonialism. As the social and mental ecology of Westerners is overrun by the weeds of this gormless but violent notion of “sharing,” commodification of indigenous culture, in which Westerners rob the indigenous of their identity to make some money, whether in a museum or a fashion runway in Paris, becomes inevitable. The genocidal violence that created the identity “indigenous” is buried under the feel-goodery of “sharing culture.” What was once a centuries-long process of horrifying violence is transformed into a stylish new trend to extract profit from, the millions killed became a human sacrifice to give commodities their fetishistic character of being a conduit social relations, of “sharing” and “respecting” the victims’ culture and identity.

Part of the challenge in uniting indigenous people is that their ability to assert their indigenous identity on their terms is straitjacketed in part by American policies toward indigenous people as much as by daily practices of everyday people. In giving itself the role of final arbiter of assigning who gets to ‘be’ indigenous and who doesn’t qualify, the US government balkanizes indigenous people before they’re even born, and those who aren’t federally recognized find themselves at the margins of the margins, without what scant resources are afforded those who do have federal recognition. Ward has found ways to bring these various groups together by confronting a common aggressor.

“We’ve been using this mining issue not just to fight to protect land but to unify different native peoples, including tribal peoples from Oklahoma and reservations as well as non-federally recognized tribes like the Carrizo-Comecrudo and Pacuache Clan of the Coahuiltecan Nation, and also, Chicanxs who identify as Tejano bc they’ve been here since before “Texas” but lost their clans/identification/more broadly and identify as native,” explains Ward.

Ward emphasizes the value of understanding others’ frameworks, saying “it’s absolutely worth it to get out of the monocultural framework of environmentalism, and genuinely diversify the way in which we work and organize.” The path to justice needs all the willing help it can get to counter a well-organized opposition like the Dos Republicas and its intricate and well-resourced operations.

But it does require time and patience. The global networks of lawyers, law enforcement, judges, mine operators, technocrats and scientists, legislators and the violence they perpetrate, is not immediately apparent to an observer. One must take the time to carefully investigate and approach organizing work diligently and respectfully, such as the hard work that organizers like Ward put into building the local coalitions needed to counter these global.

“[These coalitions] take more time to build up, maybe a full year before we saw anything on Eagle Pass, but when it happened, people were astounded,” said Ward. “ I’d hear, ‘You had people march for 8 miles in prayer? I’ve never seen that!’ and for months I’ve been doing the organizing, hours and hours meeting with people, speaking with elders on the phone, the type of work people overlook.”

But as survival from a centuries-long colonizing process is in play, long-term organizing for greater political will cannot be overlooked by organizers outside indigenous communities.

“Hopefully, we’re successful and others who see this can be successful can be in their campaigns, too,” said Ward. “We would like to be in a stronger position politically: in a lot of these mining and coal plant issues here in Texas, we have a conservative and openly hostile environment and railroad commission, state-level bureaus are very negative toward us.”

“The movement-building coming out of it, statewide and cross-state, all the ingredients organizers say they want but can’t wrap head around how to get done,” said Ward. “It’s a slower game for [outside] organizers, but the payoff is bigger, better.”

Additionally, the Enlightenment’s drive to probe anything outside itself is carried on by the individual subjects in its sway, such as environmental organizers outside indigenous communities who often demand their ways of knowing and doing be catered to.

“‘I have a right to know’ is the same as ‘I have a right to retranslate this into my framework,’” said Ward. “Organizers struggle with regular communities, that the Jemez Principles are more of a guideline, but the third principle is, ‘let people speak for themselves… We don’t want to say, ‘go into a place and extract some idea of something and then fit it into established messaging,’ we want to be able to open the space up for somebody to have their message without changing or adapting it to ‘fit into our campaign work.’ “

This ‘striving to know on their own terms’ that Ward and others have had direct experience with is inseparable from the Enlightenment.  As Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis shows, in believing that freedom from fear comes from eliminating what is unknown, “[n]othing is allowed to remain outside [the Enlightenment], since the mere idea of ‘outside’ is the real source of fear.” This leads to the Enlightenment’s subjects -- Americans, Europeans, etc. -- demanding their particular mode of engagement be prioritized over others since other modes are unknown and provoke discomfort and uncertainty.

Such a demand is seemingly innocent, even benign, since Westerners depend on “feeling good” doing what they apprehend to be “good work,” like saving the environment, as a refuge from an otherwise brutal civilization. But because of that feel-good cloak, this striving to know becomes a more perfidious example of epistemic violence.

That’s not to say that outsiders aren’t welcome. Far from it, building broad coalitions of communities with common goals and mutual respect is not only possible but imperative in order to prevail against extractive projects that leverage the international trade agreements the extractors help write to their advantage. But it demands a bit of work from those of us coming from places of greater power in which we benefit from these trade agreements more than others.

“People aren’t being ‘left out’ -- everyone is encouraged to come along this road, and people chose not to a lot of the time,” said Ward.

Some of that resistance comes from being unaccustomed to operating outside of the Western view that everything must have some immediate ‘deliverable’, that everything must be “transactional,” that somehow the work of building community and organizing for its survival must be compared to a credit swap. A political imagination limited by such a neoliberal framing can’t fathom long-term effects and won’t be successful, to the detriment of ‘frontline’ communities.

Solidarity must here be contrasted with the fashionable call for “unity.” The flexibility and dynamism required of recognizing the Other’s struggles must be prioritized over the solidification and homogenization that unification demands as a prerequisite, a liberal reform on an individual level, an advance purchase on someone else’s political program -- usually someone with power.

Ward has also made sure that there is space for the Sierra Club and people of all ethnicities to be a part of the struggle in Eagle Pass.  For him, leading with clear values makes bringing people together much easier than leading with campaign goals.

“At the end of the march in Eagle pass about ten indigenous people spoke,” recounted Ward. “We had been deep in prayer the whole day, and they all spoke and it was beautiful… the last speaker was Martha Baxter, a white woman from Eagle Pass, and she did not miss a beat: she prayed to her god, brought her religion, her sentiment, from the heart, every bit as real as the others and absolutely part of it.”

It is more of this kind of work that is needed to move forward and build stronger movements to answer the challenges that lay ahead.

“When people come together with real humility they will find that there is space for them.” said Ward. “So long as they’re genuine, settlers will likely be welcomed by Natives, and  if the feeling is that they’re not being genuine, then it’s up to them to make the change.”

“‘We’re here praying for you, too,’” Ward recounts Baxter saying.