A century from now, a totem pole raised Sunday along the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea will tell one of two stories: Either it will tell how plans to turn those waters into export highways for coal and tar sands oil were defeated by tribes and their allies. Or it will tell how those exports commenced despite feared impacts ranging from degraded salmon habitat to long-term climate damage. The battles of that war are being fought today at places like Cherry Point, or Xwe’chi’eXen in the language of the Lummi Nation. Located about 100 miles north of Seattle near the Canadian border, the rocky beach is just outside the reservation but still sacred ground for the Lummi. “They’d be building right on top of an area full of graves” that go back thousands of years, chief pole carver Jewell James said. But Cherry Point is also in a bay with deep waters ideal for huge cargo ships. A major oil refinery and two other industrial ports already sit on either side of Cherry Point. Export backers say building North America’s largest coal port here would be a natural extension for an already industrialized coast. To challenge that view, the Lummi tribesmen, women and children who carved the 22-foot-tall cedar totem pole took it on a 1,200-mile, two week journey from the coal fields in Montana and Wyoming through Washington and the Lummi Nation and finally to North Vancouver in Canada. At Friday’s stop in Cherry Point, a “Draw the Line” banner made clear fossil fuel exports aren’t seen as a natural extension. “We’re being terminated, we’re being exterminated,” James told 500 or so supporters gathered Friday along the beach. Industry, he said, has a history of encroachment in areas once the domain of the Lummis. Respecting values SSA Marine, the company behind the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point, said it is committed to both respecting the tribe’s concerns and meeting its needs. “We respect those values and will work with Lummi to realize them,” SSA Marine senior vice president Bob Watters said in a statement. “Our approach will be first to avoid impacts, then to minimize unavoidable impacts, and finally, to mitigate and positively address what remaining impacts there may be in a mutually satisfactory way.” Canada is where the pole will watch sentinel – a gift from the Lummi to the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, waging a similar fight against shipping tar sands oil to a port on the Salish Sea, the waterway along Washington and British Columbia coasts. The journey was the carvers’ way of showing that the issue extends beyond the Lummi Nation. It includes not just immediate concerns – like a coal train derailing en route to the port, or a cargo ship spilling coal in salmon or oyster areas – but longer-term issues like climate change. ‘Duty to our children’ “When that coal burns in China,” James told supporters, “it falls in our oceans causing acidification” – the process by which high amounts of carbon dioxide acidifies seawater, weakening coral and shellfish like oysters. Carbon emissions also heat the atmosphere. “We have a duty to our children to stop global warming,” added James, who carved the pole along with other “House of Tears” carvers. “What are we going to leave for them?” Thank you, Sweetwater Nannauck
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 04:22:22 +0000
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