Mox Alvarnaz, Guest Author
Tortuguita: Missing from Community and Family; Murdered on the Frontlines. MMIP and the fight against terracide committed by the carceral empire.
By now, many know of Tortuguita, a queer Afro-Indigenous forest defender shot at least 13 times by Georgia State Troopers during the January 18 raid on activists defending Weelaunee from the Cop City project. For those who don’t know, Cop City is the name that protestors have given to a proposed 85-acre militarized police training center in Atlanta that would be built within an urban park. Forest defenders have been protesting the facility for months.
Initial police claims that Tort shot an officer stand in heavy contradiction to the released body cam footage from just after the killing. The footage audio seems to reveal that, from the moment of confrontation, the cops on site believed the situation to be friendly fire.
“You ****** your own officer up?” “Did they shoot their own man?” “What is this – target practice?”
We in Humboldt know that cops lie to smear forest defenders and to cover up their own mistakes and acts of violence. Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney got firsthand experience in May 1990. Cops were very eager to charge Bari as she lay fighting for her own life. The truth of the bombing, as we all know, remains officially unsolved.
Similarly, Tortuguita and their comrades are now facing a resurgence of Green Scare demonization. Domestic terror charges are being filed against randomly snatched attendees of the January 21, 2023 protest against Tort’s murder.
Whilst Tort’s killing is described as one of the first documented instances of US forces murdering an environmental activist on US soil, Indigenous Peoples already know well the state’s wrath toward aina (land) and kanaka (people) who reject and resist colonial violence. Tort’s death is part of the long, brutal, and bloody history of disappearing, capturing, removing, and killing Native Peoples to further imperial control. In short, Tort’s death is an MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person) killing.
Every killing or caging of an Indigenous Person, from the point of contact on, has been an attack on the Earth and all its life. As well, every assault on the natural world is an effort to terminate Indigenous Peoples and our relations to the land. The US understood this so intimately; the very vision of murdering millions of buffalo was considered a necessary tragedy if settlers wished to eliminate Plains Peoples who dared to resist the Transcontinental Rail. From Toypurina’s fight against the missions, to Red Fawn in the confrontation of Standing Rock, to the 30+ Kanaka Maoli elders arrested protecting Mauna Kea: the US police and military forces (both public and private) do not take kindly to Natives who say “No.”
To this day, Indigenous environmental defenders are actively hunted across the globe as they fight to protect land and water from the alliance of corporate and governmental greed. Indigenous land and water defenders paint their faces red and hang scarlet dresses, declaring the known relationship between ecological devastation and the hunt for Indigenous resistors—especially those of us who are women, femmes, and/or live a gendered experience fundamentally incomprehensible to the colonial empire.
Deeply woven into the colonial fabric is a prerogative to control unruly bodies—particularly that of anyone who defies sanctioned gendered norms. Many Indigenous worldviews recognize a range of gendered experiences, and frequently those of us beyond the currently imposed binary were afforded special attention by genocidal settlers. Indigenous People who could not or would not bow to the male/female colonial dichotomy were specifically targeted for elimination because of our particular social and ecological roles of carrying knowledge and culture, and for being leaders in resistance.
Very little has changed since contact. Currently, the ACLU is tracking 296 specific pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation across the US, many of which target trans and gender nonconforming people. Bigoted lies about trans people like myself, Tort, and millions of others flourish in news and social media. Simple events are being shut down by threats and vitriol in our very own Ferndale.
The fight to Stop Cop City appears to tick so many different movement boxes: the fight for Black Lives, issues of policing, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples, Climate Change, Forest and River Health, LGBTQ rights, corporate control, and on and on. In truth, this struggle is not merely a nexus for a variety of issues, rather, it is the white sheet stripped away to reveal the unified violence we are facing on this Earth.
The United States is a colonial capitalist machine built on genocide, chewing up the land, air, water, and all the life that it seeks to cage, consume, and control. Underneath the white sheet, the United States is one enormous cop and all the world is the “private property” it believes we (human and beyond) are trespassing upon.
Those of us with ties to the mainstream environmental movement must expand our understanding and fight to include the very existence of the state, policing, and capital. Not just to critique its role, but to fight for its very elimination.
Enviros have, of course, been through all this before. Through the seventies and the nineties, the Pacific Northwest, Humboldt especially, understood the inherent links between the US global order, military exploits, and the ultimate destruction of the entire planet. We learned, deeply and painfully, of the hatred held for forest defenders when a tree was felled on David “Gypsy” Chain, and we heard and fought the lies told to cover his murder.
Yet, we find ourselves again at this crossroad, and often spicier arguments about extractive empire are left to languish in Greenfuse (never mind how many of our local enviro orgs were once given the same treatment by the then-mainstream organizations).
It is one thing to work within institutions for temporary tactical purposes or to redistribute funds to more useful and locally controlled projects– However, when our organizations become consumed by the very committees and bureaucracies we once understood to be our enemies, when forest defenders again lay dead amongst the trees, and we find ourselves too shy or hesitant to condemn industry and government, too skittish to oppose criminalization of action, and too meek to demand total liberation?
That hesitancy? Well, that just means the Green Scare worked.
Mox is an eco and social movements scholar and local neighborhood menace. Mox practices sustainable farming, loves nourishing soil, and currently sits on the board of EPIC (which is not responsible for Moxie’s opinions).