Editor's Note
“Every time… it never gets easier, it hurts every single time.”
These are the words of Trisha Etringer of the Great Plains Action Society, during a recent webinar, described in this Networker, referring to her work on missing-person cases involving Indigenous people.
One national database, the FBI's National Crime Information Center, recorded 9,571 Indigenous people missing across the United States in 2021—but there are gaps in data collection, such that the crisis is also referred to as a data crisis. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) movement responds to this ongoing emergency of targeted violence, aiding victims’ families and advocating for appropriate attention and response by governments. The movement also contributes to the elucidation of the complex influences and causes of the high rate of violence against, and disappearances and murders of, Native people.
There is strong evidence that a risk factor in the MMIR epidemic is the influx of men arriving from other regions to work in extractive industries, such as oil and gas, in proximity to Indigenous communities. It was even established in Minnesota government documents that Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline construction would increase sex trafficking and sexual abuse. The fracking science Compendium highlights research and reporting on the links between fossil fuel operations and crime and violence—particularly against women—in the United States and Canada. You can read a summary in this edition of the newsletter.
The webinar we link to in this edition features MMIR advocates working within this ongoing reality in the Midwest and Upper Midwest United States. They do so while preparing for the next possible wave of “man camps” to house those who will construct a massive network of CO2 pipelines, should the fossil fuel and ethanol industries succeed in their plans.
Meanwhile, we are also paying close attention, beyond the United States and Canada, to another unfolding chapter of violence inflicted on Indigenous communities by the oil and gas industry. In fact, it is a Canadian company, ReconAfrica, that is taking advantage of everything from weak enforcement of laws protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights to the COVID-19 epidemic to push their oil and gas plans in remote, vulnerable, and ecological precious areas of Namibia, in southwest Africa.
Through our colleagues at Frack Free Namibia, we learn that the targeted areas are Namibia’s poorest, with approximately 200,00 inhabitants, many of whom are subsistence farmers, and include the ancestral lands of San First Nations Indigenous groups. In an appalling example of the oil and gas industry’s dangerous and patronizing practices, ReconAfrica is reportedly “donating” its toxic waste drilling fluids to local farmers, calling it a good fertilizer for their crops.
Both the fossil fuel industry’s toxic releases and its toxic business practices impact Indigenous peoples disproportionately worldwide. SEHN partners with groups responding to these injustices, collectively using law, ethics, and science to forge effective tools for action, lifting up their voices and leadership. Thank you for reading, and for following up through your allyship with the causes and organizations described in these pages, as you are able.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN