Global Justice Ecology Project partners with Margaret Prescod’s Sojourner Truth show on KPFK–Pacifica Los Angeles radio show for a weekly Earth Minute on Tuesdays and a weekly 12 minute Environment Segment every Thursday.
This week’s Earth Minute discusses the legacy of Christopher Columbus: ongoing wars against Indigenous Peoples to control their resources. To Listen to the Earth Minute, click here
Text from this week’s Earth Minute:
This week marks the 519th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ invasion of the Americas and the brutal genocide he launched, starting with the Arawak People who he quickly wiped out.
With the founding of the United States, the Indian wars continued. Reservations, created to clear the path for the country’s conquest, were later discovered to be rich with coal, uranium, and oil, and a new war was launched to take those resources. Native Americans who resisted were jailed or killed. Communities were left with contaminated air, water and soil.
Today, Indigenous peoples around the globe are still losing their ancestral lands to corporations and investors–modern day versions of Christopher Columbus that want their lands for profit-making schemes like bioenergy plantations, industrial tree farms or tar sands oil.
Yet there are still Indigenous peoples who, against all odds, have protected their lands and maintained their traditional ways of life. We must stand in solidarity with their ongoing struggles for land, rights and dignity.
For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.