The destruction, and colonization of land is the oppression of all people who live on it. The tie to nature that people have is a part of culture in the modern era. The best place to start understanding this concept is through an example. Sam Levin starts showing us this concept in At Standing Rock, women lead fight in face of Mace, arrests and strip searches, where he describes “the jail was packed with native women incarcerated for reasons other than the pipeline actions, including one who was pregnant and feared she was having a miscarriage and another who appeared to be severely ill.” There are two very important parts to this quote: what the protestors are fighting for, and the degree of punishment they were given. The native women were standing up against colonization of their land, and were punished by the government for protecting land that was rightfully theirs.
To better understand this, we can look at another example of punishment in, Speak Truth to Power, Wangari Maathai states “when she returned to the park to lead a rally on behalf of political prisoners, Maathai was hospitalised after pro-government thugs beat her and other women protesters. Following the incident, Moi’s ruling party parliamentarians threatened to mutilate her genitals in order to force Maathai to behave “like women should.” But Wangari Maathai was more determined than ever, and today continues her work for environmental protection, women’s rights, and democratic reform.” To understand the problem here, we again need to break the example into what the women are fighting for, versus what happened to them. Maathai worked to organize a rally, which was perfectly just, and was threatened to have her body deformed. Similar to the women at Standing Rock, this punishment was out of proportion, but because they were protecting nature, their own land and fighting for political justice, they are being targeted more violently with harsher punishments.
Finally, a final example to illustrate the problematic relationship between women’s suffering and environmental suffering, In The Chipko Movement, they talk about their history defending their land from the government. They state, “The original ’Chipko movement’ was started around 260 years back in the early part of the 18th century in Rajasthan by this community. A large group of them from 84 villages led by a lady called Amrita Devi laid down their lives in an effort to protect the trees from being felled on the orders of the Maharaja (King) of Jodhpur.” The form of government, in the form of the king, had attacked a community living on the land for almost three hundred years. This led to 84 deaths in an attempt to protect trees. I included an image of this protest below. This is an absurdly unbalanced way of punishing these people who rightfully own the land, and want to keep their piece of culture intact. This is a terrible problem. We as people who use the land everyday to nourish our society, and to help keep the peace, need to stand up to protect land and the people whose land was wrongfully, violently, taken from them. 
The destruction of the pipeline on the native americans land is definitely a form of oppression. This pipe they wanted to build in North Dakota would cause a lot of problems especially for women. This pipeline would make it even harder for women to access clean water to clean themselves, as well as water for them and their families to drink. Women were worried about the possible contamination of the water as well. I can clearly imagine what a stressful thing this must be for these women. They are worried about the conditions of their natural resources. I found it so sad when I read of the harsh treatment Native American women were facing from law enforcement. Especially when they mentioned that the police have absolutely no respect for their indigenous culture. It is very clear how true this is by the way they were tear gassed, strip searched and beaten just for standing up for their land. Obviously the land can not speak for itself, so many of these brave native american women took the harsh punishments they receive for speaking up and out against the colonization of their land. After reading Maathai, I felt very sad about the way she was treated especially by people in the parliament, who are supposed to make the world a better place. I think after reading and seeing how they said she needed to act “like how a woman should.” Shows we still have to break this stereotype that all women are expected to act a certain way. How about all humans act a certain way by respecting each other and the Earth! I felt very inspired when I read that even though she faced so much oppression and violence, Maathai and many other women continued to be activists for equality for women and nature.
Hi Peter! I liked reading your blog this week and wanted to talk about a few things. First, I wanted to point out this part in your first paragraph, “the jail was packed with native women incarcerated for reasons other than the pipeline actions, including one who was pregnant and feared she was having a miscarriage and another who appeared to be severely ill.” There are two very important parts to this quote: what the protestors are fighting for, and the degree of punishment they were given. The native women were standing up against colonization of their land, and were punished by the government for protecting land that was rightfully theirs.” I also talked about this same quote from the article and wanted to talk more about it. I find that this quote very clearly shows the oppression these native women faced when they were fighting for their land. Just like you said in your post, it is very important to point out the reason why they were fighting, and it was for the right to their land that was rightfully theirs. I also wanted to point out that every example you gave in your post of women facing oppression was based on women fighting to save their native land. So women are literally being oppressed just because they want to keep their homeland and are trying to save their environment, another connection between how important nature is to women. Lastly, that photo you included is very strong and really shows just how far native m=women will go to protect their land, and just the fact that “This led to 84 deaths in an attempt to protect trees” is astounding. Overall, great post this week and I hope to read more. Stay safe!
I think you make a lot of great points about the protection of the Earth and the importance of conserving natural landscapes. Some areas on Earth have been hit especially hard in the realm of human impact, while human shows no signs of slowing down progress. It is not only important to learn, as a species, how to properly survive on this planet without ruining it for the future generations to come. Also important to protect natural environments that are at particular risk of severe destruction, pollution, and risk of not being able to make a proper rebound. The degradation of Earth’s natural environments can have substantial health risks to not only wildlife in the area, but to humans as well because of our animalistic dependency on what the Earth gives to us. I do not believe that equity plays a role in defining an environment, in an ecological or economic sense. Personally I feel that equity should be a major factor in decision making and opportunity costs, but is often look over for-profit and personal/corporate gain instead. The lower classes often subjected to the negative outcomes of environmental degradation and have to deal with whatever falls out presents itself. Both ecological or economic is in a constant fight of equilibrium, trying to find balance in their situations. For example, forest fires are a natural process that occurs in a forest when many dead or dying plants exist, turning one extreme of overgrowth to another. When forests burn down this presents an opportunity for a forest to reset itself back to a happy middle ground. The government should play a role that encourages businesses to come out with new ideas and promote progress. But this should not come at the expense of the Earth that we all share or the environment that lower classes are subjected to. All people and generations should have the opportunity to live in a place that is relatively clean and has access to clean water, safe air, and natural reservations. The government’s role should be to protect its citizens and provide a healthy environment, or force those who destroy it help fix and maintain the problems they created. The environment is something we all live inside, and we can not produce beyond what the environment allows, while pollutants slowly cripple and kill the environment. I believe our goals should be to protect what we have and potentially rebuild what we have destroyed. Public pollution control should be the more effective means of protecting the environment from the start, they have strict enough measures or enforcements. We need these laws for cases when citizens are being taken advantage of in ways that may not technically break the laws but cause harm to the public in some way. But these laws often fall short in protecting the public from environmental harm in the first place and are used as more of a safeguard for citizens who have been affected by the presence and activity of a firm. Public pollution controls like the Clean Air Act set a number of standard companies are to follow on how much pollutants they can put into the air.