![Shannon Rivers protested Trump at the Phoenix rally on Tuesday. For Rivers, a tribal citizen of the Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community, the alliance between indigenous people and Latinos is personal. “Many [Latinos] are our family,” he said. Photo by Jenni Monet.](https://towardfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image-1-1-326x245.jpg)
“The historical trauma is still happening today. We’re still suffering but in different ways,” said Anthony Thosh Collins, a citizen of the Onk Akimel O’odham with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. For Collins and dozens of other indigenous rights activists, their message in response to recent white supremacist rhetoric was simple: “This is our land.”
Source: YES! Magazine
When opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline galvanized the support of hundreds of US tribes, it became an unprecedented show of Indian Country unity and resolve.
Now, it’s a global indigenous movement.
Members of tribal communities from around the world have joined in activism led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. A Sami group from Norway was the latest to arrive on Friday. This resistance campaign, many say, has emerged as part of a greater global crisis — a united struggle in which indigenous lands, resources, and people are perpetually threatened by corporations and governments often using military force. Integral to this shared narrative is the routine ignoring of treaties.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019