These women warriors will come together to share their strengths, knowledge, and traditions.
Parcitipants
Bertha Zúniga Cáceres (COPINH) and Miriam Miranda (OFRANEH)
Freda Huson (Unist'ot'en) and Jen Wickham (Gidimt'en)
Cherri Foytlin (LELV), Anne White Hat (LELV)
Sharon Lavigne (Rise Saint James), Eve Butler (Saint James)
SUNDAY, MARCH 21ST
Start Time:
10:30 am HT / 12:30 pm AT / 1:30 pm PT / 2:30 pm MT & Honduras / 3:30 pm CT / 4:30 pm ET
End Time:
12:30 pm HT / 2:30 pm AT / 3:30 pm PT / 4:30 pm MT & Honduras / 5:30 pm CT / 6:30 pm ET
Come meet the women who collectively: have recuperated their land from narco-traffickers, are spearheading a campaign to bring some of the most powerful figures in Honduras to justice in a country that runs wild with impunity, are organizing a nation-wide process to re-found Honduras with a new people’s constitution, have been protecting their yintah (territory) from some of the biggest oil and gas companies for a decade, inspired solidarity actions across so-called “Canada” that #ShutDownCanada’s economy for 2 months, delayed construction of an Energy Transfer Partners pipeline by 2 years, shined a national and international spotlight on cancer alley, and are taking on Formosa Plastics to stop them from constructing one of the largest US plastic plants.
In the face of ongoing colonial violence and racial capitalism these communities are organizing a traditional university, recuperating territories to house climate refugees, leading COVID-19 community responses, revitalizing their languages, upholding their spiritual and cultural practices, growing food forests and using land based healing programs to address the harms of colonization.
Miriam Miranda
“We want to generate life. We want to produce. We want to have things for the future generations. We want to fight so the young people don’t leave. We must build another Honduras.”
Miriam has spent her life defending the culture, the environment, and land rights of the Garífuna people. While studying in the university, Miriam began working with women in the economically marginalized neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital, Tegucigalpa. She listened to their stories and talked to them about their rights. “That’s where my feminist consciousness was born,” Miriam explains. In 1978, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) was founded. Miriam has led OFRANEH in key organizing battles to reclaim their land. “In December of 2015 the Interamerican Court of Human Rights handed down two judgments in favor of Garifuna communities, finding that the Honduran government had violated collective ownership rights, and failed to provide judicial protection and adequate consultation. ‘It’s not only a victory for the Garifuna people,’ Miriam states. ‘I think it is a significant contribution of the Garifuna people and OFRANEH to the rights of Indigenous peoples throughout the world.” Despite continuous threats to her life, surviving a kidnapping (prevented by her ancestors according to Miriam), being arbitrarily detained and painted as a criminal by the mainstream media, Miriam presses on in her work and continues to be a source of inspiration for the 100,000 Garífuna people living in Honduras.
“We cannot accept nor perpetuate this supposed development which does not take into account or respect nature and the earth’s natural resources…We should and must have the obligation to leave water, air, food and secure the safety for our sons and daughters and other living things.”
Berta Zúniga Cáceres
“I want a country where what the people say...think, and decide would be heard. A country where we’re not afraid to go out and protest. Where we don’t fear that someone would threaten, criminalize or kill us. A country where we can decide about the project of building this country. Where Indigenous peoples aren’t denied. Where women aren’t beaten, threatened, abused. Where we can dream and build our dreams for good. That’s what we would need to say this is a free country.”
Bertha Zúniga Cáceres is the general coordinator of COPINH. Bertha was born to what she’s described as “a people of great dignity and strength.” She also was born into struggle. She was just a toddler when her mother, Berta Cáceres, co-founded COPINH.
Growing up, with her siblings, Bertha went to marches and protests – she learned young how to best avoid breathing in tear gas – read about racism, and spent time in the Indigenous communities where her Mom was organizing. The experience forever shaped her. As she put it, “To make the ancestral struggles of the communities yours, is to assume a way of seeing and being in the world.” She learned early that in Honduras speaking truth to power is a dangerous act. Weeks after Bertha assumed leadership of COPINH, she along with two comrades, was attacked with rocks and machetes and their vehicle was nearly pushed off a cliff.
Like her mother, Bertha will not be silenced. As she wrote in a column published, in Spain’s El País, “If I could tell my mother anything now, it would be ‘don’t worry: your fight lives on in me, in my sisters and brother, and in our community.’”
Jen Wickham
Jen is a member of Cas Yikh (Grizzly Bear House) in the Gidimt’en (Bear/Wolf) Clan of the Witsuwit’en people.
She is a poet, land defender, beader, mother and bad-ass aunty!
Jen has a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities from the University of Victoria with a major in English and a minor in Indigenous Studies, as well as a Bachelor of Education from the University of Northern British Columbia, focusing on secondary years. She is currently the Media Coordinator for the Gidimt’en Checkpoint, and working on a feature-length documentary film about Witsuwit’en sovereignty as a creative producer. She has broad experience working as an educator, poet, writer, a mental health advocate, and as a community support worker.
Jen is currently living in Gidimt’en yintah (territory) in what is now known as northern British Columbia. She loves to bead and spend time with family. She dreams of freedom for her people and bright shiny futures for all the young people!
Eve Butler
Genevieve Butler, "Eve." I am a Navy veteran, christian, daughter, sister, mother and grandmother, and Information Systems Tech. My home is in the historic settlement of Freetown, located in the 5th District of St James Parish, Louisiana where my family has lived for more than 100 years. I returned to Louisiana in 2008 to help my mother rebuild our home after Hurricane Gustav. In 2014, we learned our community had been labeled Future-Industrial by the Parish and I began to advocate for changing it back to residential. My ancestors believed in family and community, their bottom line "What I want for myself I must want for others.”
Anne White Hat
Anne White Hat is a member of the Aśke Gluwipi Tiośpaye of the Sicangu Lakota, one the Seven Council Fires of the Oćeti Śakowin. Miss Anne is a direct descendant of Chief Hollow Horn Bear. She is the proud mother of three, a community organizer, and founding member of the Indigenous Women’s Advisory Council of the L’eau Est La Vie -No Bayou Bridge Resistance Camp, Board Member of the Native American Women's Health Education and Resource Center, and member of Another Gulf Is Possible collaborative. White Hat Botanicals is her trade name featuring what she calls her ‘community determined’ botanicals and remedies. She is a grant writer by trade, community organizer out of love for her people, jack of all trades by hustle and blessed to work with plants for you.
Cherri Foytlin
Cherri Foytlin co-founded the L’eau Est La Vie Camp. She’s a journalist, speaker and mother of six who lives in south Louisiana. She is out on a joy ride for justice. She is the author of “Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion,” and regularly contributes to www.BridgetheGulfProject.org, the Huffington Post, and several local newspapers. She is active in the environmental justice movement of clean air, water and soil as a human rights issue.
Cherri takes us on her journey of moving to Louisiana with her husband for him to work on the oil rigs to becoming one of the leading activists in the fight to stop oil pipelines. After the BP oil spill hit, Cherri saw first hand the devastation that the environment and the people depending on that environment suffered. Instead of shrugging her shoulders and going on with her busy life, she took a hard look in the mirror and asked herself what did she do to cause that and what could she do to fix it. It was then that Cherri decided to embark on a radical journey to challenge our way of life, to help people see the harms in our current economic systems and dependence on extraction. She’s an advocate for a just transition to sustainable energy, but she never loses site of understanding what drives ordinary people to work in the industry and she leaves room for their humanity too. All the work that Cherri does to build a different world is rooted in love and love is a radical action especially when confronted by consistent campaigns by mainstream society that seek to dehumanize you. When Cherri was arrested on felony charges for non-violent direct actions, she pressed on. When Cherri was assaulted for her work to protect water and people’s ways of life, she pressed on. Both Cherri’s charm and actions inspire the radical imagination that is necessary to build a different world.
Freda Huson
Freda Huson is the face of Indigenous sovereignty in Canada’s Northwest. After leaving a comfortable life on the reservation over a decade ago, she moved onto her ancestral lands to protect them from the invasion of multiple pipeline companies. As she coordinated hundreds of volunteers to build cabins, lodges, and a three-story healing center on her traditional territory, she was dubbed an “Aboriginal extremist” by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and her home was labelled Canada’s “ideological and physical focal point of Aboriginal resistance to resource extraction projects.” Facing off with pipeline workers and police, a woman with no prior background in politics or public relations became the spokesperson for the Unist’ot’en people of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. It’s a role entrusted to her by the elders and highest ranking chiefs of her clan, who honour her by giving her the chief name Howilhkat.
Today Freda runs the land based healing programs in the Unist’ot’en Village, along with her niece Dr. Karla Tait, as a space for Indigenous people to heal from the trauma of colonization and reconnect with their cultural and ancestral practices. The ongoing trespass of industry and police however disrupt land based healing programs and continue to wage colonial violence on Indigenous lives.
Sharon Lavigne
Sharon Lavigne has lived all of her 68 years in St. James Parish, Louisiana. She can tell you about a time when the fig and pecan trees in her neighborhood produced plenty to eat and sell, and when her grandfather caught fish and shrimp in the Mississippi River. The land and the water surrounding it wasn’t always poison.
Today, Saint James is part of the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans filled with more than 100 petrochemical plants and refineries. Formerly known as “Cancer Alley” for the prevalence of cancer among its residents, the community now calls it “Death Alley.” Sharon too suffers from liver damage and other medical issues, including aluminum exposure.
In early 2018, when Sharon learned that Formosa Plastics Group, a Taiwanese supplier of plastic resins and petrochemicals, had announced that St. James Parish would be the site for a massive project that would create 14 chemical plants, she says she asked God for advice. “Do I need to sell my home? He said no. I said, ‘Do I need to sell my land, the land that You gave me?’ He said no.” “God told me to fight,” she continues. “And I’ve been fighting ever since. I’ve been going in the fast lane.”
Anne Spice
Anne Spice (she/they) is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation, a queer Indigenous feminist and anti-colonial organizer, acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, and an Associate Fellow at the Yellowhead Institute. She has been actively supporting the Indigenous land re-occupation in Wet’suwet’en territories since 2015, and her work dwells in the intersection of Indigenous geographies, histories and futures of Indigenous resistance, poetry and art. Her writing has been published in Environment and Society, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and Asparagus Magazine.
COME HEAR THEM SPEAK!
