Mission Statement

     CERTAIN was initially formed in 1999 with the stated purpose of countering racially-based 'special rights' and 'termination' discourse targeting American Indian Nations, Alaska Native Nations, and Canadian First Nations. The Makah whale hunt controversy, the Minnesota and Wisconsin Chippewa Fisheries controversies, and the Esgenoôpetitj (Burnt Church) Mi'kmaq controversy have shown and continue to show us that groups and individuals with agendas far-diverged from animal rights, fisheries, or whaling issues are willing to use such issues as a springboard or smokescreen for wider anti-sovereignty and anti-Indian purposes; the alliances made by some anti-whaling groups in the US Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Alaska, and by so-called "individual lobstermen" in Eastern Canada, in reality the employees of corporate lobster-packing concerns, with individuals and groups with admitted anti-treaty rights or racist agendas in are examples that speak for themselves. At the outset, we came to the conclusion that we, American Indians, Canadian Aboriginals, and Alaska Natives needed to join together to form a central coalition to initiate campaigns in defense of our cultures, our treaty rights, and our rights to self-determination and existence as human beings.

     As time passed, research conducted independently of CERTAIN, and on CERTAIN's behalf, revealed that much of the underlying construction of arguments made by animal-rights groups, so-called "deep ecologists" (or their other self-proclaimed title, "biocentrists"), and other professedly anti-Native "environmental" groups was rooted in the same elitist rhetoric that pervades the "nature writing" of upper-middle- and upper-class Whites, primarily males, writing that emphasizes a false construct of an imagined "pristine" wilderness positioned in direct tension with a similarly imagined construct of "fallen" urban and industrial areas. In short, the imagined "wilderness" is the refuge of the wealthy Whites who use it in respite from their work in the "fallen" areas.

     Such a construct ignores the contested middle ground, particularly in that most of the extractive industries that create wealth for the few do so in areas deemed as "sacrifice areas" - the locations of huge open pit coal mines such as the Peabody mine on Black Mesa on the Diné (Navajo) Reservation and in the poor White communities of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, the copper mines on or near Indian trust lands or near low-income communities of people of color in Arizona and Montana, the similar siting of toxic waste dumps in close proximity to communities of poor people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and the construction of nuclear power plants such as that on the Prairie Island Mdewakanton Dakota Reservation in Minnesota, now also being used as a storage facility for expended - but still deadly - spent fuel rods. The central issue becomes the fact that these "sacrifice areas" are not expanses of unsettled and despoiled lands, set aside and fenced off as such, with a wider "safe area" provided for human beings of lower economic, racial, and ethnic status to live in safety and comfort. Rather, these "sacrifice areas" are the homes of such groups. Decisions made in distant corporate boardrooms, and in a distant Congress, Executive, and Judiciary, clearly favor the rich over the poor - and "poor" is a increasingly inclusive term, as greater numbers of those who considered themselves in a protected middle class, similarly if not equally privileged with the rich, are finding themselves in similar situations to those they considered "unfortunates," having themselves to work two jobs, or having to have both parents in the household work in order to "make ends meet" - in a gap in wealth that consistently grows with the passage of time.

     One notable theme mentioned above, that of the "pristine wilderness" in contemporary writing, is remarkable for its consistency with colonialist European writings of the late 15th through late 19th centuries, and is powerfully located in concepts such as "frontier," "untouched wilderness," "pioneer," and other similarly emotion-laden language intended to suggest that North, Central, and South America were somehow untouched, and more importantly, uninhabited, though as many as 150 millions of human beings lived in the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus, and, more importantly, that they had left the marks of environmental management everywhere across both continents.

     We at CERTAIN believe that the time has come for the widening gap between environmentalists - largely EuroAmerican- and EuroCanadian-dominated groups - and Native, Hispanic, Black, Asian, and all other people of color to begin to narrow once again. We all have the same things to lose, and for the same reasons. The toxic waste dump built in or near the community composed primarily of lower-income "minorities" (although "lower income" becomes more and more problematic as the gap between the rich and the poor becomes more attenuated, as noted above) today will be located in tomorrow's exurban or suburban area. The US as a nation produces more toxic waste than any other on this planet, and it has to go somewhere. George Carlin's famous concept for the so-called "middle class," which he referred to as "NIMBY!!!" - "Not In MY Back Yard!!! - is quickly being silenced across the nation, as the failure of peoples of all racial, ethnic, religious, or whatever diverse backgrounds to form grassroots movements to prevent the poisoning of the water our children and we ourselves must drink and the air we must breathe continues, driven by the racial/ethnic wedge that is single most powerful tool of the perpetrators of corporate greed.

     Colonialism no longer affects just Indians, or those at the "bottom," because the locus of the "bottom" is rising faster than most people can climb to stay above it. It affects us all.

     We hope that you'll join us and add your strength and effort to turning back the tide of disinformation and misinformation put out against American Indians and Canadian First Nations, and help us particularly in our struggles to protect treaty rights and to keep our peoples free from Western cultural imperialism. If you're not an Indian, but you're not one of the power elite, your turn will come.