Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands

by Zoltán Grossman, Winona LaDuke (Foreword by)

Overview

Often when Native nations assert their treaty rights and sovereignty, they are confronted with a backlash from their neighbors, who are fearful of losing control of the natural resources. Yet, when both groups are faced with an outside threat to their common environment—such as mines, dams, or an oil pipeline—these communities have unexpectedly joined together to protect the resources. Some regions of the United States with the most intense conflicts were transformed into areas with the deepest cooperation between tribes and local farmers, ranchers, and fishers to defend sacred land and water.

Unlikely Alliances explores this evolution from conflict to cooperation through place-based case studies in the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, Northern Plains, and Great Lakes regions during the 1970s through the 2010s. These case studies suggest that a deep love of place can begin to overcome even the bitterest divides.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295741512
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	06/20/2017
Series:	Indigenous Confluences
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Zoltán Grossman is professor of geography and Native studies at The Evergreen State College. He is a longtime community organizer and coeditor of Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. Find out more at https://sites.evergreen.edu/unlikelyalliances.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One | Running Upstream

1. Fish Wars and Co-Management: Western Washington

2. Water Wars and Breaching Dams: Northwest Plateau

Part Two | Militarizing Lands and Skies

3. Military Projects and Environmental Racism: Nevada and Southern Wisconsin

Part Three | Keeping It in the Ground

4. Resource Wars and Sharing Sacred Lands: Montana and South Dakota

5. Fossil Fuel Shipping and Blocking: Northern Plains and Pacific Northwest

Part Four | Agreeing on the Water

6. Fishing and Exclusion: Northern Wisconsin

7. Mining and Inclusion: Northern Wisconsin

Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Naomi Klein

When Indigenous peoples united with ranchers and farmers to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, they blazed an electrifying new path away from climate catastrophe. Such alliances to defend land and water have been taking shape for decades—and they have much more to teach us. Grossman draws out the key lessons from these stories with great skill and care.

Dallas Goldtooth

"Unlikely Alliances demonstrates that our ongoing fights for climate justice are not isolated struggles, but are founded upon a legacy of collaborative resistance. This book is an essential read for all organizers, water protectors, and land defenders who wish to build healthier, more sustainable communities and native nations."

David Rich Lewis

"Unlikely Alliances offers a prescription about how cooperation between rural Native and non-Native communities and environmental organizers can be extended and encouraged. It is intended as a roadmap for the future, based on past experience."

Naomi Klein

"When Indigenous peoples united with ranchers and farmers to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, they blazed an electrifying new path away from climate catastrophe. Such alliances to defend land and water have been taking shape for decades—and they have much more to teach us. Grossman draws out the key lessons from these stories with great skill and care."

Lisa Blee

A broadly comparative work that will be helpful for identifying approaches that lead to workable alliances between neighbors, and for highlighting recent successful Native strategies to assert control over significant natural resources.

Brian Cladoosby (Speepots)

"Tribal nations' fight for treaty rights has always been on the frontlines. We will build bridges with our neighbors to find common ground, but cannot compromise our future. As place-based societies, we can no longer allow business as usual."

Interviews

As Native nations have asserted their treaty rights and sovereignty, they have confronted a “white backlash” from their neighbors fearful of losing control over the land and natural resources. Farmers, ranchers, and fishers have at times been virtually at war with Native peoples over treaty resources such as fish and water. Yet faced with an outside threat to the common environment— such as a mine, dam, bombing range, coal train, or oil pipeline—some communities unexpectedly joined to protect the same resources. Strong rural alliances of Native peoples and their white neighbors, such as the Cowboy Indian Alliance, came together in areas of the U.S. where no one would have predicted or even imagined them. Some regions with the most intense and violent conflict were even transformed into the areas with the deepest cooperation to defend sacred lands and water. Unlikely Alliances explores this evolution from conflict to cooperation through place-based case studies in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, from the 1970s to the 2010s. They suggest how a deep love of place can overcome the most bitter divides between Native and non-Native neighbors, but only through challenging white privilege and upholding tribal sovereignty. They offer lessons about the complex interplay of particularist differences and universalist similarities in building social movements across lines of racial and cultural identity. They also show how “outsiders” can be transformed into “insiders” by redefining a contested local place as common ground. In our times of polarized politics and globalized economies, many of these stories offer inspiration and hope.

Editorial Reviews

"This text offers itself as a pragmatic guide, and, as such, its ideology tends to privilege finding immediate solutions for the crises it addresses. This immediacy is fitting, of course. Ecological threats aren't the kind of thing that can wait to be resolved. Unlikely Alliances is also, ultimately, a hopeful text, one that celebrates a kind of progress in these alliances."

Transmotion - John Gamber

The most valuable contribution of Grossman’s detailed study is that it provides a useful guide for building alliances against environmentally destructive projects and evaluating what strategies have been successful, and which ones have not worked so well, in defending rural land, resources and cultures.

Race & Class - Al Gedicks

Unlikely Alliances is particularly salient in a contemporary context of both political gridlock and increasing environmental threats. With specific attention to each rural context, Grossman acknowledges complexity and the dynamic intersecting factors that allow Native/white alliances to thrive or, conversely, to erode and dissolve. The lessons he offers from rural Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, and beyond support the place based work of constructing collaboration across lines of historic conflict.

Native & Indigenous Studies Journal