DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED

BERTA VIVE ✊🏽| 3.5.21

They say that when Berta Cáceres died, her spirit multiplied.

I believe it.

This week, March 2, marked five years since the assassination of the Indigenous Honduran activist. On Thursday, she would have turned 50. A devoted land defender of her Lenca homelands in southwestern Honduras, Berta was gunned down by hired hitmen for her successful campaign to stop the Agua Zarca Dam project on the Gualcarque River—the vital lifeline of the Lenca people.

Five weeks ahead of her murder, she agreed to meet with me in La Esperanza, the small bustling community where her organization’s headquarters were located, known as COPINH or the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. My interview request had taken several weeks to organize, and once I finally arrived from New York, it took a few days of waiting for Berta. I actually grew worried that the trip might be a bust.

The photo above is one I most treasure from the two unforgettable days I got to spend with Berta. When I requested to take photos at the Don Tiki Restaurant where she sat strategizing with her team over a plate of rice and beans, she showed her vanity to me—this fierce woman—something I’ll never forget. For much of the day, she’d been wearing one of those big, foamy neck braces to support an area where she’d been storing a lot of her stress. She didn’t want to be pictured that way. Rather the image I think she was going for was the boss-in-action look that she embodied: fearless and dedicated even though she was literally on the run, hiding out to save her life.

The image above is one of the dwellings Berta told me she at times hid out in, the day we journeyed to the hilly Lenca community, Rio Blanco, in a beleaguered SUV pocked with bullet holes. The stories behind them were as intriguing as her own. As we bobbled on dusty mountain roads, past pastures of farm animals, crops, and humble homes, she stopped at a bend in the road, turned off the engine, and began to tell me the story of how she’d been arrested at this very site—alleged weapons charges by military officials. She spent the night in jail, she said.

“For those of us who are in the struggle, it’s seen as a crime to fight for Indigenous rights, to defend territory, and to demand any sort of justice,” Berta told me. “So then the struggle... well, that brings repression and that brings threats."

The arrest happened at a time when violent tensions were high. In 2013, COPINH had led a year-long sit-in that had prevented dam companies from accessing Lenca lands. Berta’s name, already on a list of people under threat, told Al Jazeera she’d suddenly ascended to the top of it.

By the time I met Berta, many news editors had come to see her dangerous activism as perhaps performative, or at the very least, “crying wolf.” Of the five or six news outlets that I pitched her story to, no one wanted it. My chronicling of her — believed to be the last press interview she ever gave, only became newsworthy after she died.

This is a time of year that we honor women —and just as Deb Haaland is making history this month in advancing her Interior nomination to a full Senate vote—it’s fitting that Berta is with us each March. This edition of Indigenously is somewhat of a shrine to her, peppered with links to deeply-reported Instagram posts like this one that never really got out elsewhere.

There are plenty of options including a book, a podcast, another audio take from Radio Ambulente in Spanish, and so much more. I’ve not consumed any of them, but it affirms what they say—that when Berta died, her spirit really did multiply. 🦋

Thanks for reading, friends. See you next weekend!

Jenni

THE INDIGENOUS INTERNET

ENDORSEMENT

When I set out to report on Berta’s story, it was self-financed, just like my reporting at Standing Rock. After close to two decades in the news business, by 2015, I knew that telling stories about dams or pipelines on Indigenous homelands would require such bottom-up buy-in. It’s not right, but it is what it is.

I’m posting this here in case you or someone you know could use a little funding to help tell these stories that are so vital and so difficult to get published. Average grants are around $1250 for an Indigenous journalist anywhere in the world reporting on our biggest emergency: the climate crisis.

Applications are due soon: March 12 . Here’s the link.

FEEDBACK

“Great article. Proud of Deb.”

Vincent, Albuquerque, NM

Thanks, Vincent for this feedback.

I heard from several Pueblo people following last week’s newsletter. Many were happy to see our narrative centered in a way that hasn’t been seen in newsfeeds. One area though, that I wrestled with all week, is with the use of the word “patriarchy” to describe our Laguna Pueblo gender dynamics. As one reader noted, these modern-day roles of government are colonial systems—not to be confused with our religious protocols which are spiritually seperate. Indeed.

QUOTE

The Indigenously newsletter is produced by Jenni Monet (Laguna Pueblo)

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